Transparency and heritage preservation

Transcription

1 Transparency and heritage preservation Ten years of experience at a regional level Kristina Markusova

2 Kristina M arkusovâ - civil engineer. She completed postgraduate studies in the History o f Architecture and Heritage Preservation at the Technical University in Prague. From 2000 she was employed at the Monuments Board of the Slovak Republic, as the Director of the Regional Monuments Board in Kosice. Between 1994 to 1999 she delivered a course on the restoration of historic buildings at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture in the Technical University in Kosice. Between 1983 to 1995 she supervised heritage preservation at the Regional Institute of Monuments Care in Kosice, with a special focus on the restoration of St. Elisabeth s Cathedral in Kosice. She is the author of numerous articles on the preservation and restoration of sacral buildings in the region. She has participated in numerous conferences devoted to Heritage Preservation and in international cooperation programmes on documenting monuments and heritage preservation. Her research interests include places of worship, medieval sacral buildings and medieval urban architecture - their condition, preservation, restoration, documentation and use for new functions.

3 Transparency and heritage preservation Ten years of experience at a regional level Kristina Markusovà Territorial heritage protection should use transparency as one of its basic tools. Let us look at some facts about the past. Territorial monuments protection originated in the 1950s in Slovakia (even under the common state of Czechoslovakia), and the historic reserves of the towns of Banska Stiavnica, Bardejov, Keżmarok, Kremnica, Levoca, Poprad-Spiśska Sobota, Presov, and Spisské Podhradie-Kapitula were declared in 1950, while Bratislava was declared in 1954, and Banska Bystrica was declared in The reserves of folk architecture were also declared in the late 1970s: Ćićmany, Podbiel, Vlkolinec, Żdiar, Osturńa, Spania Dolina etc. The declaration of the protected historic town reserve in my own town of Kosice was only declared in However, there is a huge difference between these previously declared preserved urban areas due to the fact that those declared in the 1950s and 1960s are only focused on medieval towns, surrounded by a medieval fortification system, without any consideration to later periods of urbanisation. Thus, a flood" of new eight to twelve-storey apartment blocks have been built very close to the historic centre, restricting or completely obliterating the view of the protected town centre. At the time of the declaration of the protected reserve in Kosice, the methodology of care of monuments became aware of the values of architecture and urbanism, not only from the 19th century, but also of the period between the First and Second World Wars. This is the reason for the extensive border of the reserve in Kosice which now protects both the medieval town and the line of the fortification system, as well as the housing and a boulevard from the 19th century. This area now contains more than 1,000 buildings, with almost half of them being individually listed monuments. Also among these protected buildings are functionalist houses built in the 1920s and 1930s. The housing from the last 200 The 1s t H e rita g e F o ru m o f C e n tra l E u ro p e 229

4 years forms a natural buffer zone against new residential buildings around the historic centre. Looking at the history of Kosice, it seems there was a smaller tradesman settlement on this site, positioned on the crossing of ancient trade routes leading from east to west and from the Baltic to the Black sea. The foundation of the town itself, however, was realised by German-speaking colonists, so-called guests, invited from Western Europe by the king of Hungary to re-inhabit the country destroyed by the Tatar invasion between 1241 to The king gave various advantages to these guests to encourage them to found and build fortified sites (towns) using the so-called Magdeburgian Law (Saxonian rules for town-foundation and municipality). The new burghers were merchants - tradesmen and serfs of the Hungarian king who didn t belong to any nobleman - and were ready to fulfil the main demands of the king by building the town-fortification system as quickly as possible and paying taxes. Research shows that the newly constituted parcel-system in Kosice was democratic, with each parcel having a more or less equal size facing either the main street or other parallel streets of the medieval town. This did not allow any citizen to dominate his neighbour, nor display his wealth through a pompous prospect of his house. The width of each parcel was about 8-11 metres, and the length from the main street entrance up to the back street gate was more than 50 metres in some of the largest blocks. These one or two-story medieval houses with cellars were built from the end of the 13th up until the end of the 15th century. There were usually rooms for trading (shop, stores, stalls and barns) on the ground floor and residential rooms on the first floor. The entrance from the street was through a large gate entering a long gateway to the courtyard, although the narrow courtyard did not allow a wagon or carriage with horses to turn, so it could only enter via the front gate and then leave through the backstreet gate. There are also some other features which show the significance of Kosice in the Middle Ages: the large parish church of St. Elisabeth, the former cemetery chapel of St. Michael, two beggar-friaries, the Dominican and the former Franciscan church and friary, and some fragments of the medieval town fortification. The town first blossomed during the 14th and 15th centuries. In 1556, however, four fifths of the town burnt down, followed by the Turkish invasion of the country which cut off trade sources from the south. Over the next few centuries, the houses were kept and adapted for new requirements without changing their size. Even the Renaissance phase 230 I Kristina Markusova

5 View of the houses at Main Street, Kośice Kristina Markusovâ, Krajskÿ pamiatkovÿ ùrad Kosice, Slovakia was satisfied with two storeys, until the Baroque period demanded much more magnificent architecture. However, the former "democratism of the citizens was swept away by the Austrian Empire s absolutism, resulting in two or three houses being owned by one person, connected by new openings inside and covered with a new façade from the outside, mostly o f one or two storeys. These sort of adaptations also survived the 19th century, and thus the medieval housing is usually not visible to the visitor on first sight, but heritage research is starting to reveal the medieval origin of the cellars, the ground floor-masonry, the disposition of the bearing walls and the gateway, the courtyard-shapes as well as a lot of other architectural details. Later, the Reformation and counter-reformation The 1st Heritage Forum of Central Europe 231

6 Map of the protected town reserve in Kosice Krajskÿ pamiatkovÿ ùrad Kosice, Slovakia (re-catholisation) took place in the country, continued by numerous uprisings against the Habsburgian rulers and completed by the revolutionary years between 1848 to Kosice next blossomed in the second half of the 19th century. After i860, there was huge development in various fields including industry, traffic, urban structure and architecture, the arts and education, and this period also saw the opening of a railway station in Kosice on the Budapest to Silesia line. This was the decisive period in the architectural shape of the town centre which is now under heritage protection. There was no legal act for building permission in the country, and each municipality organised permission in its own way. In Kosice a so-called "Building Statute was declared by the municipality in The quality of this statute is proved by the fact that there are some records from other cities constituting their local acts on the same basis, and after the First World War when Kosice became a part of the newly constituted 232 I Kristina Markusova

7 Czechoslovakia, the local Building Statute was fully assumed by the new municipality - simply translated from Hungarian into Slovakian without any changes (published in 1921). This archive material is a good starting point for us to understand the reasons, rules of usage and original functioning of the construction or disposition arrangements o f the houses. Under the leadership of the Communist party after 1948, the state became the owner of each building in the country, so territorial heritage protection was centralised as far as urban development is concerned. A methodological document - the so-called Protection Principles" - was usually prepared after the declaration of each individual protected area: a historic reserve or zone. This document was usually prepared in four copies: one for the archive, one each for the central and local Monuments Institute, and one for the local or regional governmental board. It was quite difficult to read these Protection Principles if you were not a staff-member as they weren t available for public access (under the argument that this was special expert material not understandable to the other ), and because of the centralised planning of the country there was no threat of "not allowing anything which had been planned. As a result, large parts of the historic centre of Bratislava were demolished for new urban planning of the new capital because this was the up-to-date policy of the Communist party. After political changes in the country at the end of the 20th century, there was also a change in the heritage policy. In 2002 the new Act Nr. 49 on monument protection1 was approved, in which the Monuments Institute turned to a governmental monuments board with a number of tasks and competencies. The method of putting these decisions into reality is in the framework of administrative proceedings, and means that the process has very strict rules, although always gives a chance for participants of the proceedings to make appeals. This is the very point at which transparency could get this stage in the framework. As the majority of heritage buildings are represented by private ownership, the need for cooperation of all interested participants in the process o f using heritage buildings, and their maintenance and renewal, seems to be one of the most important goals. According to the position of the Monuments Board, we take decisions under the framework of the Code o f Administration Proceedings (or administrative law: Act Nr. 71/1967 in Slovakia), we provide 1 In English: en_eurovkm_zakon_opf.pdf (accessed April 2012). The 1st Heritage Forum of Central Europe 233

8 View of the historic centre of Kosice from the south Kristina Markusovâ, Krajskÿ pamiatkovÿ ùrad Kosice, Slovakia the supervision of heritage building renovation and restoration of mobile objects under heritage protection, we impose fines for offences and administrative delinquency realised against heritage care interests according to the Act, and we cooperate with municipalities for their urban and regional planning documentation etc. For each protected historic reserve and zone we prepare special data on heritage protection, or Principles". As the Principles of the particular protected area has to be followed and taken into consideration by the activities of the owners, users, visitors, local governmental and municipal authorities, civil n g o s, architects, and entrepreneurs etc., they all represent the consumers and decisive subjects of heritage protection. And the most important thing is to make them acquainted with the heritage values of the area and the ways and goals of its protection. Only through effective participation of all these parts is it possible to manage the survival and proper usage of the heritage values of the historic town centre. There is one decisive point I would like to underline: neither legal acts nor highly developed heritage specialists in governmental boards are able to conserve and protect the architectural heritage of our historic towns if there is a lack of interest from the community 234 I Kristina Markusovâ

9 Houses on the Main Street in Kosice - eastern side Kristina Markusovâ, Krajskÿ pamiatkovÿ lirad Kosice, Slovakia Houses on the Main Street in Kośice - western side Kristina Markusovâ, Krajskÿ pamiatkovÿ ùrad Kosice, Slovakia The 1st Heritage Forum of Central Europe 235

10 View of town reserve roofs in Kosice Kristina Markusovâ, Krajsky pamiatkovÿ ńrad Kosice, Slovakia and its self-government. The only way for our heritage to thrive is the cooperation of all the interested participants. And as our legal advisor said: "If you want everybody to follow your demands on monuments protection in Kosice, let them to get acquainted with it. Therefore, we decided to "translate the former local "Principles of the historic reserve town of Kosice into the legal terminology of the new Act. We had to use the same vocabulary (thesaurus) as the legal basis for explaining the objectives in the Act very precisely (the conservation and regeneration of the historic plan arrangement and subdivision, the composition of objects, the height and spatial arrangements of the objects, elements of street interior and furnishing, typical views, sky-line and panorama, archaeological finds or other possible cultural and natural values of the historic site), and the local characteristic features of the town reserve in Kosice, and we had to point out the connected international charters and conventions etc., in order to work out the precise Principles for own "town reserve (accessed April 2012). 236 I Kristina Markusovâ

11 It took about half a year to create a large document explaining all we knew about our historic centre, describing the results of the different heritage research in this area and outcomes of a number of publications, enlarged by our own experience in the field of territorial protection. We then asked the municipality to allow us the opportunity to officially inform the Municipality Council about this material, and promoted it in a presentation which included a slide projection. The council accepted the information and immediately decided to vote for a declaration to support and follow these Principles in the decisions of the municipality. The next step was to locate our Principles" on the website of the municipality ( chapter "Strategic Documents ), which could also be seen as an important psychological moment for the public. It seems to be more effective in the eyes of private owners, users, developers, and designers etc., for the Principles not to be on the website of the Monuments Board, but actually on the local self-government website. The municipality then asked the staff of the regional board (the authors of the Principles ) to enlarge the material with explanations, examples, and pictures etc., and arranged for the publication of 1000 copies of an edition of a book (with one copy going to each of the486 listed monuments). Since 2006 we have managed the distribution" of this book to the owners of each listed heritage building in Kosice.3 We added an attachment to the book on a c d - r o m containing the texts of our Act of Monuments Protection, as well as all the international charters and conventions which our country has signed in this field. We thought this would help us - and the owners - to find a better way of preparing the conservation of historic buildings in Kosice. The book, however, doesn t seem to be the winning factor in this story. The fact which helped us the most in the process of supervision and regulation of the houses in the city of Kosice, is the accessibility of the Kosice "Principles on the website of the municipality. We usually give the link to this website as a justification, including parts of the official decisions, so that everybody is able to follow the basic rules and solutions we have applied.4 As we were starting out with the idea of making our Principles" available on a large scale, there had been voices among our colleagues 3 Radoslav Mokriś et al., História Koste pre budùcnosi mesta - Zasady ochrany pamiatkovej rezerväcie, Kośice (accessed April 2012). The 1st Heritage Forum of Central Europe 237

12 View of the historic centre of Kosice from the east Kristina Markusova, Krajsky pamiatkovÿ ùrad Kosice, Slovakia in Slovakia some years previously that it would not possible to work out methodological material on the special topic of territorial heritage care and make it usable and accessible to everybody. There was a fear that it might lead to misunderstandings and rather rigid applications of the pattern, and there was also the fear that heritage protection is a unique field not able to be tackled by any "formula. However, if you were doing our job and meeting the house-owner or architect for the first time, explaining 238 I Kristina Markusovâ

13 the very basic concept of monument protection to him or her, again and again, day after day, you would find the possibility of shortening the task by handing over a sheet of paper where the web-link was written quite rewarding. There is also a negative effect with activists of various movements and groups who supervise our work and ask for information about particular decisions or agreements for different projects in the historic centre. And it is very comfortable to point out the relevant chapter and the appropriate web-link in our answer. We have also gone a long way in our experience in cooperating with activists and n g o s, and in a number of cases it has ended up being extremely effective to answer the questions of activists to secure public support for our official demands, especially when an individual stakeholder wanted to demolish his or her property in the protected area, or was trying to neglect maintenance until the building would fall down by itself and leave a nice site for some new high-rise architecture. In some cases it was also very fruitful to know the public s opinion which was accessible through internet discussion forums. In our opinion the majority of very decisive activists - some of them quite militant - live in newer suburbs or quarters, in residential buildings from the socialist period, without any identity or architectural values. Maybe this is the reason they feel some responsibility for the historic value of the site where they belong; they recognise the importance of historic architecture in the centre of a living town, and feel the value of identity labels. Or perhaps they simply have a real citizenship-attachment to their town (there is a saying explaining that cities have always had citizens, but that communist cities only have a population). Comparing our capital, Bratislava, which has been pressured to use every bit of earth in the historic centre for new high-rise buildings, although requests are still not so decisive, there is a lack of an actual functioning urban plan with clear demands or restrictions in Kosice. There is just a previously ratified urban plan which is over 20 years old with hundreds of little additions and corrections, but which has no real vision of a collaborative strategic goal-oriented planning, and which should also contain sustainable development in the historic reserve. What should our goal in a protected town reserve be? It is hard to define in a few words, but we used to explain it as follows: the best situation is if it looks like there isn t any heritage protection board at all, as if time had simply stopped for a while, and the owners had permanently been taking care of their old houses. It s so simple! Let s look at an example: if a stakeholder wants to change something on his protected house, if he or she would like to open the roof and arrange The 1s t H e rita g e F o ru m o f C e n tra l E u ro p e 239

14 a roof terrace, for example, he argues against all the similar roofs and openings in Kosice referring to his goals and asking for the permission to do the same. He points out objects which were realised without permission, albeit before 2002, when our permission - or the lack of it - was not taken into consideration by the boards of the building permit. And then the main argument comes: "You know, during my holidays I was in so and so very nice town in France, Italy, Germany etc., and it really looked as if it was a hundred years ago - old houses, old pavements on the street, shingles on the roofs, no modern openings, no modern façades or shop windows - so I respect that it is quite reasonable to conserve these places in their historic shape. But you have to admit, on this street in Kosice it has no sense. And here is his raison d'être: he would like to have a comfortable terrace with a nice view on all the old roofs he can see, and to enjoy this view with his morning cup of coffee. It would be a waste not to use the opportunity of this location. And there is usually a tough surprise for the owner in understanding that if we permit every roof a nice terrace or two, nobody would have a nice view of the roofs, but only terraces of various shapes and sizes instead. The conclusion is that each stakeholder wants us to be very strict with his neighbours but especially tolerant, respectful and understandable with him. And here we again see the crucial word "transparency - nobody should be allowed a terrace in this area, without exception, because this area is a historic structure with its own proportions and elements of local character, and roof terraces would be an alien element in Kosice, disturbing the presentation of historic values. I understand that heritage protection is a multidisciplinary and very complicated scientific battlefield, and it is not possible to make a manual" or formula for it because the immanent feature of each listed monument is its uniqueness, and each object should be treated as an individual case. However, when it comes to territorial regulations, it would be very useful to have some understandable and transparent rules.