historical preservation
Safeguarding the past
Historical preservation is the effort to protect and maintain buildings, sites, artifacts, and other remnants of the past from deterioration or destruction.
The term encompasses everything from restoring old houses to designating landmark districts to archiving documents.
The neighborhood fought for historical preservation of the Victorian homes.
In American English, often shortened to simply preservation; British English prefers conservation.
- restorationReturning something to condition
- cultural heritageInherited collective traditions
- heritageInherited cultural legacy
- folkloreInherited cultural narratives
- oral traditionsCulture transmitted through speech
adaptive reuse · digitization · landmark designation · indigenous practices · cataloging · archaeological sites · patina · museum exhibits · rituals · zoning regulations · preservation society · grant writing · brownstone · culinary heritage · family heirlooms · tourism · brick and mortar · recordkeeping
- building historyarchitects, builders, construction techniques, building materials, masonry
- MassachusettsBoston, Cambridge, Cape Cod, Plymouth, Salem
- museum thingsart, paintings, sculptures, statues, fossils
- Florence historyMedici, Renaissance, Uffizi, Ponte Vecchio, Arno
- frontier historypioneers, settlers, homesteaders, frontier tales, westward expansion
- landscape designgarden design, landscape plans, plant selection, hardscape, softscape
historical preservationdemolition
Deliberate structural destruction
redevelopment · urban renewal · destruction · razing · teardown
historical preservationcultural amnesia
Society forgetting its past
futurism · iconoclasm · damnatio memoriae · historical revisionism · forgetting
historical preservationdecay
Gradual organic breakdown
deterioration · neglect · dilapidation · ruin · disrepair