Breaking the Hermeneutic Circle: Architectural Conservation as Normative Interpretation

This paper addresses the relevance of hermeneutics to the methodology of architectural conservation through re-visiting the conservation project of a 14th century building directed by the author in Cairo in 1997. It hermeneutically rereads the problem of dating the building and thereby deciding on the intervention strategy. In doing so, it argues that the exercise of correlating conservation theory with hermeneutics is enriching for both disciplines, endowing the former with more insight into the act of interpretation and the latter with a normative perspective.