It can be difficult to understand the history of a building. The record of interventions that have been made may not always be complete or show whether work carried out in the past actually achieved what it set out to do.
The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) manages The Hill House in Helensburgh, west Scotland. It was designed by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, the artist Margaret MacDonald. The house, which was built at the turn of the 20th century, shows how different approaches to conservation over the course of a building’s life can have an impact on its current state.
According to Bryan Dickson, the head of building conservation policy at NTS, the way the building has been maintained has changed in recent decades. The aim used to be to retain as much of the original fabric of the building, but now the priority is the building’s aesthetics.
“During the 1990s, it was thought that the building was in good order, and it was only in the mid-2000s that there were more instances of water ingress,” says Dickson.
“Interestingly, that might be related to a subtly changing climate – Helensburgh has the highest wind-driven rain index in Scotland.
“By the mid- to late-2000s there were more instances of rot. Where the sandstone that the building is constructed of has a cement roughcast on the external face, water comes in through micro-cracking and other cracking on the roughcast. It saturates the sandstone masonry, but doesn't evaporate outwards. Then the stone disaggregates back to sand and causes a bridging of the wall cavity, so you get damp that can track all the way to the timber and the internal surfaces.
“What we were finding was with that damp in timbers were being affect by rot, which had a subsequent risk bearing in mind the internal decoration,” says Dickson.
Inside the box
The building was “dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of water”, said the NTS president, historian Neil Oliver.
In 2015 the NTS received a grant from the Getty Foundation’s Keeping it Modern scheme to support the development of a long-term conservation plan for the building, with the foundation noting: “The NTS has found a piecemeal approach unsatisfactory for the creation of lasting solutions. The Getty grant will support the completion of a conservation management plan for the property that unifies all of the prior research to create an integrated approach to the long-term care of the building.”
A significant project is now underway, with the house being placed inside “The Box”, a steel-framed chainmail structure designed to protect The Hill House from the rain.
Dickson characterises the box as “buying a bit of time” in order to develop and undertake a comprehensive conservation strategy. The house will stay open to the public, providing a new visitor experience through a series of raised walkways.
NTS has worked with Historic Environment Scotland on a digital scan. This overlays infra-red thermography and microwave moisture levels to create a model that will allow the team to monitor the building’s fabric, as well as being used in visitor interpretation.
Now there is a comprehensive understanding of the building, subsequent interventions and additions can be planned in line with the requirements of the project.
Informed approach
Liz Smith is the head of architecture at the architecture and heritage consultancy Purcell, which specialises in conservation and project management.
“Our approach is rooted in a thorough understanding of two things before we do any work at all,” says Smith. “Those two things are to understand the significance of the heritage asset - so we spend quite a lot of time analysing the building, understanding who designed it, why they designed it in the way that they did, and understanding the building's fabric. And the next step is to understand the condition that the building is in. Significance and condition underpin our approach.”
“We are progressive in our conservation approaches,” Smith says. “I'm interested in conserving historic buildings because of what they mean about the past society that constructed them. But I think we owe a duty to a historic building to lay down the best of today’s society as well, to record our heritage for the future.
“We need to be progressive about how we treat historic buildings, not to preserve them as a museum artefact in themselves, but to make sure that they are alive, active and relevant. To do that we do need contemporary approaches to architecture and sometimes contemporary approaches to conservation techniques.”
Purcell worked on the main building at St Fagans Museum of National History, as part of an extensive redevelopment of the museum that was completed in 2018. The building, designed by modernist architect Percy Thomas in 1976, “says a lot about architecture in the 1970s but doesn't really say very much about Wales, or the museum or the things they do there,” says Smith. “So we've restored the building, but also given it a new role as a centrepiece within the museum. It's become more open, inclusive, and usable. We gave it significant new-build additions, including transforming the courtyard into a spacious central foyer, and updated the galleries around it so now it really is an orientation hub.
“It was interesting because we're now doing quite a lot of restoration to 20th-century buildings, and there's a slightly different approach. You still need to understand significance, and you still need to understand condition, but what you tend to find is that rather than the hand of the craftsman touching each of the materials – as would be the case in an 18th-century country house, for example – it's less about the restoration of each individual piece of material and more about the restoration of the original design intent, the expression of modernism that the architect was trying to get across.”
Containing collections
Purcell is also working on the £35.5m redevelopment of the National Portrait Gallery, London, in partnership with Jamie Fobert architects. This aim is to create a more coherent visitor experience and increase the public space, as well as adding a new learning suite and step-free access – and involves turning three of the windows on the Grade 1-listed building’s north facade into doorways.
“The building is only a container for the amazing collections,” says Smith. “Creating the optimum conditions for the display of portraits that represent the history of Britain means there needs to be a combined approach to understanding the building but also the collections and aspirations for display.
“One of the challenges and opportunities of working with museums is that there are so many people, so many diverse departments – curatorial, learning, outreach, retail. A museum is an absolute hotbed and that richness of brief makes a museums project so exciting.”
Ultimately, making sensitive additions to a historic building requires holistic engagement, says Smith. The recent restoration of Yr Ysgwrn, the former home of Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, and the current Reimagining Wordsworth project at the Wordsworth Museum in Cumbria, both involved the architects to understand not just the building but also the work, life and ethics of the artists that lived there.
“Buildings are made for humans to express themselves in and through,” says Smith. "It can't just be an academic exercise about architecture, it needs to be about the people who've lived and worked there, and will continue to."
The future
As with most conservation, change is inevitable. At The Hill House, increased rainfall may have contributed to the need for a different approach, but Dickson believes that global climate breakdown is likely to affect all the NTS’s properties in different ways, requiring stronger or weaker interventions from those maintaining them.
This could simply mean more preventative work – adapting drainpipes and drains to discharge water more quickly, and more weeding. But Dickson says that also, in the future, “difficult decisions will be required when it comes to affordability, or sites that are being so critically eroded by weather patterns that maybe in certain circumstances you have to let them go. I think that's part and parcel of the challenge.
“What we've done at The Hill House is to put it in a box, which is quite a museum approach to conservation,” he says. “This project maybe allows us to get the public to think a bit more, and engage with the building in a variety of different ways.”
The Box at The Hill House is the subject of an exhibition seminar at the Museums Association Annual Conference and Exhibition in Brighton on 3-5 October.
