Sostenibilità, tutela, nuovi orizzonti della ricerca storica

The contemporary idea of sustainability has centuries-old roots, comes with industrialization. The protection of the built heritage and the landscape constituted an essential part of the concept. The British example - linked to the names of Ruskin and Morris , it is well known , while the German one is less known in Italy. The attempts to give concrete answers, the ambiguous outcomes , the social and political relevance that environmental issues are still today in German culture, all better understand the differences between the contents of the idea of sustainability in early twentieth century and today's debate. The political and cultural relevance of the Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz decreases when it reduces the protection of the environment to " mitigation" , the defense of a traditionalist architecture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the preservation of built heritage is so effective , and becomes an essential tool of sustainability, insofar as it fails to take advantage of the multiple knowledge that underpins the conservation of buildings. The historical knowledge - far beyond the traditional history of architecture - and archeology which studies the material sources, play a special role, and their results profit by scientific research and orient it. This is also true for the two sectors where the relationship between cultural heritage and landscape protection and sustainability is wrongly showed as problematic, that is, the toxicity of building materials and energy conservation.