A Sustainability Based Framework for Evaluating the Heritage Buildings

Introduction

Heritage buildings inherited from the past are crucial component in our modern society. Heritage include those buildings, structures, artifacts, and areas that are historically, aesthetically and architectural significant. The three factors that determine if a property is worthy to be listed as heritage are historic significance, historic integrity, and historic context. Historic significance is related to the importance of a property to history, archaeology, engineering or culture of community. That includes any heritage building that is associated with past events or important persons or has distinctive physical characteristics of design representing work of a master. Historic integrity is relevant to the authenticity of a building identity with an evidence of the existence of its physical characteristics during the building’s historic period (Central Public Works Department 2013). As of August 2018, there were 1092 sites on the World Heritage List: 845 cultural sites and 209 natural and 38 mixed properties, located across 167 States Parties. Their geographic distributions are as following: 47.07% of these sites are in Europe, 23.63% are in Asia and the Pacific, 12.91% are in Latin America, 8.7% in Africa and the rest are in the Arab states. Figure 1 and Table 1 provides a summary of the number of World Heritage buildings by region. Since heritage is constantly under threat by worldwide ecological issues, political issues, and improvement, heritage sustainability has turned into a fundamental thought. Heritage sustainability can be defined as designing built environment that follow the standards of social, economic and ecological sustainability (McLennan 2004).

Figure 1.

Summary of the number of World Heritage buildings by region (McLennan 2004)