The cost effectiveness of continuous maintenance for monuments and historic buildings

Abstract

For cultural and aesthetic reasons, it seems obvious, that sustaining the high quality of historic buildings is a necessity. There are a number of organizations maintaining historic buildings by a monitoring system all over Europe, although there is no published data on the economic advantages of the practice. The aim of our research is to show that besides the cultural and aesthetic arguments, there are sound economic reasons for continuous maintenance. Our study focuses on the costs by comparing the case of regular maintenance, to that of isolated renovation that takes place every 15 or 20 years after a long period of negligence. In our pilot we have monitored six typical historic buildings to identify the economic facts alongside the aesthetic and cultural arguments, in order to clarify the importance of keeping our built heritage in good condition.