RE-CREATION OF ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE AS A SOURCE OF AUTHENTICITY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31650/2786-6696-2025-14-17-24Keywords:
authenticity, architectural heritage, forms of re-creation, identity, falsificationAbstract
The problem of re-creation of architectural heritage has traditionally remained within the field of conflicting assessments. The classical doctrine established by the Venice Charter interpreted authenticity through the material substance of the monument; therefore, any re-creation was regarded as falsification. At the same time, historical experience shows that when not only the material fabric but also the very space of memory is lost, re-creation becomes the only means of restoring cultural continuity. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, under the influence of the Nara Document, the Burra Charter, and the Riga Charter, the concept of authenticity expanded beyond material substance to include cultural, social, and semantic dimensions and, with this shift, the very understanding of re-creation also changed.
The purpose of the study is to substantiate re-creation as a cultural act capable of generating its own authenticity. The methodological framework combines instruments of architectural and conservation practice with interdisciplinary approaches. The use of historical-analytical, comparative, system-structural, and hermeneutic methods made it possible to consider re-creation not merely as a technical procedure but as a cultural act in which architecture becomes a carrier of memory and a medium of reflecting on the past.
As a result, a conceptual model of the multiplicity of authenticity was proposed (including material, functional, contextual, and conceptual dimensions), along with a typology of re-creation forms: scientific, representational, adaptive, imitative, and falsification. The article examines two polar forms – scientific and falsification – as examples of opposing strategies of interaction between authenticity and contemporaneity.
The study demonstrates that re-creation is not the antithesis of authenticity: it may serve as its source, creating conditions for renewed experience and interpretation of the past. In this process, the genuine and the imagined, memory and the re-created image continuously interact, forming a new, dynamic authenticity. An open question remains whether a falsified re-creation can, over time, become living heritage – accepted by society as its own.
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