In the wake of the fire last week that gutted Notre-Dame, questions are being raised about the state of thousands of other cathedrals, palaces and village spires
that have turned France – as well as Italy, Britain and Spain – into open air museums of Western civilization.
“There are no exact statistics,” said Didier Rykner of France’s La Tribune de l’Art, but added that France sees “several fires every year in historic buildings, which is already way too much.”A 2015 study by the German engineering giant Siemens showed that Scotland had about 10 damaging fires a year, while England lost at least a dozen listed buildings a year. Germany has seen 70 such buildings destroyed since 2000.
In Spain, the Gran Teatre del Liceu – Barcelona’s opera house – was destroyed almost entirely in 1994 by a fire caused by spark that fell on a curtain during routine repair work.Experts say what’s lacking is the constant attention and regular maintenance that could help avoid the need for major restoration work, but that costs money. The problem has been exacerbated by the austerity budgets many European nations adopted after the 2008 financial crisis and during Europe’s subsequent debt crisis.
“Reparation or restoration should be seen as the failure in conservation,” he said. “We would be spending money in maintenance but we will be minimizing potential future damages.”“We should never forget that there’s also a cost to nonaction, a lack of maintenance or a lack of prevention,” he said.The problem is that prevention is practically invisible but grand restorations can be a boon for the politicians cutting the ribbons.
“You have seen that, now, the money is not the problem,” said Quaedvlieg-Mihailovicis. “There is a lesson. Could we not invest smaller amounts, and not just for the biggest and the most iconic monuments?”
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