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Historical Building Renovation as a Construction Project



Author(s)

Daniela Dvornik Perhavec and Nataša Šuman

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DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2013.06.009

Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Maribor, Maribor 2000, Slovenia

Approaches to building renovation require high professional levels, interdisciplinary elements, team work and time to study and do research on the buildings. The process of renovating historic buildings is made up of agreements and compromises between the interests of the government, common interests, and the motives and interests of individual owners and prospective investors. Research that deals with any portion of cultural heritages always carried out very precisely, but there is still no precise knowledge of how to define a system and draw up a model that accurately represents a cultural heritage. In the existing literature on this topic, the authors have written about the different views of how to explain the construction project as a system. While many authors focus on “sub-phases” directly connected to the building of an object, the process involved in the construction phase often neglects the phases required before beginning work, which culminates in a logical sequence in the process of preparing a project. Irregularities or deficiencies which occur during the preparation process of a project often directly impact the construction itself. What the scope of this impact depends on the approach of the contractual organization, the organization of construction companies and on co-operation between the customer (or architects) and the contractors. Unlike the projects for newly built objects, the conservation projects of cultural heritage are not only more demanding because of lack of knowledge of the building materials, construction, foundation and interaction of the mentioned individual parts into a unit called a building. The authors analyzed the structural aspects of building conservation which were suggested by Beckmann and Bowles and another methodology, which was developed as part of the 5th framework program for the purpose of providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary treatment of the revitalization of a historical city. The authors found that both methodologies do not include modern IT tools and methods. By analyzing and monitoring the restoration of historic buildings in Slovenia, specifically in the city of Maribor (including all documentation, interviews and direct views) the authors found that the project was regarded as a collection of individual projects rather than a unified whole (a system). The authors have demonstrated the consequences of structuring a historic building restoration project in a non-systemic way. This type of project can be classified as a non-sustainable renovation. In this article, at first the authors will try to clarify what types of systems and subsystems are considered in renovating historic buildings. The authors show when and why a system becomes stochastic (a probability) and in the end what would be needed to successfully re-establish it back to a determined system. By analyzing the work and reconstruction of old buildings in Maribor, the authors found that it would be necessary to give a new framework with IT tools for the preparation of a historic building restoration project.

Cultural heritages, renovation projects, general systems theory, determined systems, stochastic system.