Every decides what moment in a building's life is the true one.
A temple altered in four centuries has no original state to return to.
Choosing the earliest form destroys the evidence of everything that followed.
Choosing the latest preserves a nineteenth-century repair as though it were the intention of the builders.
resolved this in principle by preferring to .
Keep what exists, make it safe, mark clearly anything new and reverse nothing that cannot be undone.
The principle is widely signed and unevenly applied, particularly where tourism pays for the work.
A ruin is difficult to photograph, and a sells tickets.
Several sites rebuilt to a original have lost their listed status and gained visitors.
Local communities are rarely on the side that outside experts expect.
A building in use is maintained by its users, who repair it with the materials available and do not consult a .
That practice has kept many structures standing for centuries and is precisely what conservation rules restrict.
Living heritage frameworks attempt to hold both positions by protecting the practice rather than the .
A roof rethatched every twenty years is then the heritage, and the individual straw is not.
That framing solves the philosophical problem and leaves the administrative one, because a grant must still be spent on something specific.