“World Heritage,” UNESCO, accessed April 29, 2025, ➝.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 3, The Fall (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851), fig. 5.
Caroline Roux, “Venice Architecture Biennale’s Carlo Ratti: ‘People Talk about Mitigating Climate Change Harm but It’s Too Late,’” Financial Times, April 23, 2025.
Béatrice Grenier, “The Ugly Truth of the Restored Notre-Dame,” Log 63 (Winter/Spring 2025): 31–33.
For Ruskin, restoration was “the most total destruction which a building can suffer” and he insisted that it is “as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.” However, he praised the practice of spoliation in the architecture of the Lombards. See Ruskin’s 1849 essay “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” (8.242, 8.195), quoted in Ryan Roark, “The Afterlife of Dying Buildings: Ruskin and Preservation in the Twenty-First Century,” in Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to the Storm-Cloud, eds. Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 2021).
Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelean Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 13.
Avicenna, De viribus cordis (Venice: per Paganium de Paganinis, 1507), 1.10, fol. 547r, quoted in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 136 (Emphasis in original).
Gayane Umerova, introduction to Tashkent: A Modernist Capital (New York: Rizzoli, 2024), 8.
Pablo Larios, “Soft Power: On the 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale,” Artforum 63, no. 9 (May 2025).
Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 301–303.
Grenier, “The Ugly Truth of the Restored Notre-Dame,” 32.
Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956).
Ollabergan Allaberganov et al., “The Architectural Legacy of Samarkand and Bukhara along the Silk Road,” Archives for Technical Sciences 32 (2025): 30–31.
“What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” UNESCO, accessed May 17, 2025, ➝.
The city of Samarkand today presents a vivid picture of the results of this mode of preservation and restoration, particularly in the three madrasas in the Registan public square.
