In the 21st century, conservation has finally become mainstream. Once just an object of abstract speculation, now conservation is an actual practice and an issue of key importance, due to the current transformations of the world regarding climate change adaptation (ICOMOS, 2019). The ever-growing scarcity of resources and the cultural demand for more sensitive and sensible means of recycling materials or reuse infrastructures has transformed how architects and urban designers think about creating and providing solutions for the built environment (Goodman, Till & Iossifova, 2012).

So, the heightened importance of ‘maintain over demolish’ is having momentous effects on the entire world of building practices. On one hand, design decisions have become much more complex, having to consider a vast array of problems that make the architect/designer constantly switch between the caps of an art historian, an economist, an anthropologist, and an engineer. On the other hand, this has somewhat warped a very traditional hierarchy, having the newly inflated Preservation topple what is classically known as Architecture by means of a ‘formless substitution’ (Koolhaas, 2014).

Despite these current definitions that can make Conservation as a form of design part of the broader field of Sustainability, architectural conservation experts are bound to different meanings of this concept and how it still provides criteria for architectural design, with proximities or distances on how ‘preservation’ was primarily identified as a social demand. Ordinarily, Italian perspectives of the definitions of ‘conservation’ in the 20th century dominated the international standards for assuring the permanence of architectural heritage to future generations. As a result, a gamma of practical guidelines was developed by distinguished scholars and summarized by international organizations to qualify material-based approaches to maintain historical value (Jokkilehto, 1986).

As conservation demands-responses are changing (Orbaşli, 2017), new architectural design protocols for quality and efficiency are also setting new parameters. Consequently, training is also changing (Musso, 2021). Values-based approaches for design are more often in architecture schools, in many cases positively transforming architectural education and research: participation strategies are more and more common (Harder et. al., 2013), accompanied by reuse practices (Plevoets & van Cleempoel, 2017; Stone, 2020), while digitization is modifying representation of material substance and how to assess it (Fiorani, 2021). Also, management techniques are becoming part of the daily tools of the architect: community engagement, risk assessment, policy-planning and monitoring are proving that every aspect of a building’s daily functioning may hold potential to influence its permanence through time (Cunha Ferreira, 2018).

DESIGNING CONSERVATION is an innovative platform to bridge these new but still scattered discussions.