SCARAB views ancient buildings as objects of tradition. A tradition in good health is constantly changing, but its fluidity is bounded. Tradition has little place for individual genius, but great respect for creativity in community.
Continuity of tradition should not be confused with keeping things the same; that is the task of preservation, not conservation. A continuity of sameness fixates on answers; continuity of tradition is concerned with questions, specifically with maintaining and developing the questions that sustain a culture. It is the role of tradition to keep those cultural questions alive. This can only be achieved by a radical tradition of dynamism, and not by modernity’s pseudo-tradition of stasis in the service of political conservatism.
A conservation of answers literally ‘has no future’. Only a conservation of the question is able to reconcile the claims of past, present and future. This ‘balanced heritage’ allows for creativity, making space for the uninvited guest, and for the young alongside the old.
It is not possible to deal well with the objects of tradition without a comparable pre-modern understanding of tradition. The new wine of modernity threatens to destroy the old wineskin of a living building because it does not understand the subversive vitality of dynamic tradition.