Conservation of Architectural Heritage: the Maintenance Culture in the Education Process

Maintenance is the process that aims to guarantee the efficiency in time of the patrimony. It has to be considered that the concept of “efficiency” evolved in time and that an acceptable answer, in a process of sustainable development, is the mediation between the requirements of the users and the safeguard of the heritage’s identity. It's now well known that the control of decay and obsolescence processes has to be integrated in the design action in order to satisfy the users exigencies and to guarantee the identity of buildings. The role of technology is to switch the analytic phase into the design phase, creating a link between critical knowledge and practice. Maintenance actually can also be intended as strategy of development or as strategy of readjustment of a dismantled development that for decades has neglected to check the quality of his results and whose current consequences can measure themselves in the disarranges. With maintenance it is possible to keep constant the value of the available built capital in time and, therefore, sustainability is promoted: maintenance and sustainability are strongly correlated one to the other .