With the coming end of 2017, a total number of eight issues have been published since Heritage Architecture was launched two years ago.

The ‘Special Focus’ of this issue is featured with three articles on various aspects of architectural conservation in Italy. Firstly, it presents the article titled ‘An Italian Contribution to Architectural Restoration’ contributed by Professor Giovanni Carbonara from the Faculty of Architecture, the Sapienza University of Rome (translated by Zhu Guangya and Yang Tianchi). Similar to the crucial impact of diagnosis and therapy on a patient, the standard of architectural conservation fully depends on the expertise about the assessment of values and the status, and on the level of restoration techniques as well. This principle, which is simple to enunciate, is far more complicated to apply, as a small discrepancy might lead to the failure of the whole project. In Italy, restoration is always considered as important as conservation in a strict sense. In this article, the author distinguishes the concept of ‘restoration’ from other terms related to conservation and explains the inevitable conflicts existing in architectural restoration, deepening the integrated and dialectal restoration methodology to a certain degree.

The second article in this column is an introduction to the architectural restoration course in Italy contributed by Professor Riccardo Dalla Negra from the University of Ferrara (translated by Tian Yang and Li Yue). This article highlights the course plan for restoration theory and its applications, thus providing an important reference to the education on architectural conservation in Chinese Universities. The column ends with the article ‘A Review of the World Heritage Sites Inscription Courses of China and Italy’ by Liu Lin’an and Shan Chao from Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Currently, the amount of World Heritage sites in Italy and China ranks respectively as top one and two in the world. This article briefly examines the World Heritage sites in both countries regarding their constitutive categories, geographic locations, and the inscription courses.

In the ‘History and Theory’ column, the article ‘Reconstruction or Re-creation: From the German Pavilion to the Barcelona Pavilion’ contributed by Gao Changjun and Li Xiangning addresses a constantly debated question in the field of architecture and cultural heritage, that is, what is the value and significance of reconstructing a historic monument that no longer exists? Through the comparison between the original German Pavilion and the reconstructed one around half a century later, the article reveals the inheritance of the original designer Mies van der Rohe’s thought and the perception of the re-constructors. In this sense, although the reconstructed Pavilion is not the original one, the spirit of the heritage is revivified to a certain degree; the reconstruction work, thus, added value to the building both nominally and practically. The second article in this column is ‘Rotonde de la Villette: Typological Vagueness and Its Evolution’ by Chen Dijia, which makes a detailed diachronic analysis on Rotonde de la Villette—a masterpiece of the late 18th-century famous French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux—regarding the origins of the building type, the architectural characteristics, and its evolution through history. The article displays a spark of early modernity with the vagueness of the old and the new in the architectural heritage at the late stage of the Enlightenment.

This issue’s Warfield Column theme is the granary, which is the symbol of livelihood and a special building type in rural communities. The author shows us his distinct observation and concise analysis of those granaries with singular shapes and special ways of construction. 

The ‘Project Analysis’ column consists of four articles. Tang Shikuang’s article is a close reading of Bai Miao Tu (Atlas of Miaos) which presents Miao dwellings’ settings of everyday life in the Qing Dynasty as well as its genius loci by using the method of iconography; while Pan Xi and Yao Yifeng’s article ‘The Immaterial Building Craftsmanship of Vernacular Architecture and Its Inheritance’ discusses several issues about the local craftsmanship in the Naxi villages. The two case studies have made new attempts to expand the scope of regional and vernacular architecture research. Qian Chen and Zhang Ting’s article ‘A Historical Presentation in the Present View: Design Process of the Renovation of the Ni House and Its Inspiration’ is a case of the adaptive reuse of old buildings, but the authors’ emphasis on the historical dimension of the project brings the discussion into the context of architectural heritage.

Sun Zheng and Cao Yongkang’s article closes this issue, introducing the accuracy assessment of aerial testing for architectural heritages given by unmanned aerial vehicles, contributing to the technical issue of architectural conservation. (translated by Li Yingchun)