Varak és kastélyok (A 25. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1995 Eger, 1995)

Előadások: - Eeva-Liisa Rautalahti: Suomenlinna – világörökség

housing and working area and recreational area, are still valid. The re-evaluation is focused more on the means to achieve these goals. The amount of new constructions is limited to minor entities, small houses and so on. The respect for all periods and stratifications has induced the decision to preserve all existing buildings and find a reasonable function for them without changing them too much. The Principles in Present Building Conservation The conservation works on Suomenlinna today could really be called repairs and works of maintenance, sometimes renovation, and sometimes perhaps also modernisation, and sometimes a combination of all of these, but very rarely restoration or reconstruction any more. A Danish professor

1 has very clearly defined five criteria to be considered when working with or evaluating building conservation. It is important to define the identity of a historic building in order to be able to preserve and clarify it. The originality must be assessed as evidence of the history, important in passing the building on to the next genration. The repairs must be made respecting the authencity of the building. The compatibility of materials and methods used in repairs is important to prevent damages by wrong materials or bad handling. Reversability, i.e. what is added must be removable without losing anything of the originality, is a clear conclusion to the idea that future generations may have a different approach than ours. These criteria seem to be selfevident, but a building conservation project is always a very complex task. Almost always some degree of modernisation is also needed; new functions demand new facilities, toilets, electricity, kitchen, central heating, etc. Reversability is sometimes difficult to realise — if the building is going to be used for a function other than being simply preserved as a museum. The balance or compromise between the conservation principles and the demands of modern use is sometimes hard to find. The Working Process On Suomenlinna the archive studies and measured drawings in each project are made by the National Board of Antiquities. The intepretation of how to use this knowledge and how to read the building as evidence of its history i.e. the approach to the conservation, is mostly defined during a design process by a project group consisting of an architect, engineers and representatives of the National Board of Antiquities and the Governing Body of Suomenlinna. The process is rather dependant how skillful and motivatedd the architect and other specialists are towards conservation. On Suomenlinna, like elsewhere, there are difficulties. Sometimes time is limited or there is not enough resources to make proper research — and then it is best to do as little as possible. Sometimes it is difficult to get the architect to understand that this is not his or her project, and sometimes the result is not too good in the details because of a lack of skillful craftsmen, or the persistent idea that the new is always better than the old, making someting to look as if it were new. The Shorework Fortification of Kustaanmiekka One example of the conservation works under construction is the repair of the granite walls of the shorework fortification of Kustaanmiekka. It was originally built by the Swedes in the