"Historic Preservation Theory is a timely volume in that there is nothing else like it ever produced. Within this compendium, Jorge Otero-Pailos achieves the ambitious goal of expanding our understanding of historic preservation theory through an international lens across time periods and scales." --Sir David Adjaye, OBE, Founder & Principal, Adjaye Associates

This indispensable new resource is the first English-language anthology of historic preservation theory with an international perspective. It includes close to 100 essential texts spanning three centuries of preservation discourse and theory, from the Enlightenment to the present, each with a critical introduction by the editor. Unique in its geographic and temporal breadth, it shows how ideas stemming from disciplines such as jurisprudence, architecture, art, planning, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and many others were woven together over time into what we now call historic preservation. This anthology offers classic texts from influential thinkers and schools of thought from the United States, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and more.

This anthology begins to break down the disciplinary, nationalist and linguistic barriers that have limited the study of preservation theory as it also includes many first-ever English translations of foundational texts, such as Henri Gregoire's "Report on the Destructions Brought About by Vandalism, and on the Means to Suppress It" (1794), which not only coined the word "vandalism" but also served as the intellectual impetus for the creation of a national heritage protection bureaucracy under France's revolutionary government. Other first translations include Georg Dehio's "Monument Protection and Monument Preservation in the Nineteenth Century" (1905), which shaped modern preservation in Germany; Gustavo Giovannoni's "The Theory of Pruning" (1931), which changed the paradigm of how to modernize historic centers in Italy, and Liang Sicheng's "Why We Must Research Chinese Traditional Architecture" (1944).

The texts are presented chronologically, with introductions by the editor that contextualize each thinker's contribution to the development of historic preservation theory.