Vassilis GANIATSAS

Heritage predates conditions and finally forms our cultural life, while we constantly reframe it in changing urban contexts. In this diachronic, dynamic cultural process of conservation and development, a diversity of stakeholders invests different sets of values, establish different cultural significances and envisage different futures for their heritage. Yet, heritage is common to all in both; its spatial dimension, as it occupies the common public space of all stakeholders, and in its temporal/ historical dimension, as it equally pervades their shared history and memory. We could add to G.K. Chesterton’s phrase “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to our ancestors”, that heritage, as tradition, is also the democracy of giving a vote to our unborn descendants. What is urgently needed in order to accommodate this growing diversity of involved stakeholders of heritage at any one time, but also at different times involving past, present and future generatio...

The MuA Project (Μνημεία υπό Απειλή) is a programme for the recording, documentation, and assessment of heritage whose values are at risk. It also functions as an open-access, participatory project for the sharing and processing of information concerning risks that endanger cultural heritage, and it promotes protection in a creative way. The first deliverable of the programme is an interactive, on-line database based on the results of a research study on managing cultural heritage at risk and its potential applications on the world wide web. This paper discusses the objectives for the development of the MuA database and its background. Further, some key aspects in the theoretical reasoning behind the project are analysed, along with the ways they were implemented in a functional, on-line database.

... Chapter 17 Embodied Energy in the Rehabilitation of Old Industrial Buildings in Scotland by ... building itself, or in the imagination of the building through drawings, paintings, literature ... Sensingarchitectural heritage values enables an equally sensitive response to them either by ...

The man-made environment is mutually constitutive with socio-cultural life in it Apart from its physical and formal characteristics, every setting is characterized by an idiosyncratic process of development. Relating new architecture to an existing setting is a problem which reveals the fundamental issues concerning the interpretation of this setting and intervention in its development. As such, this problem concerns the development of architecture as a whole. Amid contemporary world-wide universalism, there is also a need for a sense of belonging to the environment we collectively live in, and for a lasting relationship with it. The current dilemma of conservation versus planning can find a satisfactory resolution or else, be considered as a false dilemma on the basis of a contextually concerned planning and a conservation philosophy which enhances contemporary development and can there¬ fore be considered as a form of it. Permanence and change are considered in this study as compl...

The main problems with landscape design and planning have been that ‘Landscape’ has been mainly used as context and in visual terms.
  There is a need for a conceptual paradigm shift from landscapes as global aesthetic visual images to local functional entities and a consequent shift from ethically neutral aestheticism to ethical responsibility.
  Towards this end, this paper revisits the notion of intentionality in Husserl and more particularly its noetic/noematic structure. This is to address an adequate approach to the comprehension of the Landscape as an object, under interpretation or/and re-constitution in our intervention to it. This conceptualization has to be creative in both its noetic and noematic dimensions alike, if it is to justify the multifarious and infinite facets of landscape as an object of phenomenological analysis.

Keywords: Nature, Landscape, Context, Object, Phenomenology, Husserl, Intentionality, Noetic, Noematic, Ethics.