The Problem of Preserving a Ruin

[A] A ruin is a building in the middle of a process, and a decision to preserve one is a decision to halt that process at a particular moment. [B] The moment chosen is almost always the moment at which the building came into the care of the people doing the choosing, which has no special claim on the history of the structure. [C] To hold it there, mortar is renewed, wall tops are capped and water is led away, and the fabric that results is in part a modern one. [D]

The two positions are not as far apart as their advocates make them sound. Those who argue for consolidation point out that a ruin left alone does not remain as it is but becomes rubble, so that declining to intervene is itself a decision about the future rather than an abstention from making one. Those who argue against reply that every intervention writes the present into the object and makes it harder for anyone afterwards to read what was original. Each side is right about the other. What divides them is not a question of fact but a question of value: whether the ruin is chiefly a document, which any addition corrupts, or chiefly a place, which has to be kept standing if it is to be visited at all.