David Garrard

My PhD research is concerned with philosophical questions surrounding the practice of preservation and conservation, particularly with regard to buildings, monuments and other features of the built environment.

This practice has, especially over the past hundred years, assumed an increasingly important role in the way we relate to and regulate our man-made surroundings. What are its constitutive values and guiding assumptions? What view or views of the relationship between past, present and future must we hold in order to engage in it? Can the diverse motives for preservation - and its opposite - be brought under a single rubric, and if not, how if at all can they be weighed against one another? How do the motives for preserving what exists relate to those for restoring what has been lost, or for realising what has yet to be? How does the situation differ between the case of buildings and that of other artefacts, or of abstract entities like texts and traditions, or of natural phenomena like species and landscapes? What, in general, can we say about the rationality of preferring the old to the new, and/or the actual to the potential? How, in a democratic and pluralist society, are the legal and compulsory aspects of preservation to be justified?

As well as the aesthetics and metaphysics of architecture, my research will draw upon philosophical accounts of death and [im]mortality, intergenerational and intertemporal ethics, the temporal dimension of rationality, the distinction between nature and artifice and the structure of public justification. My aim is to provide a basis both for future theoretical work in this largely unexplored area, and for practical decision-making about the historic environment.

I grew up in Manchester, and went to university in Exeter, Canterbury and Oxford, studying first English literature, then philosophy, then architectural history and conservation. Since qualifying in the latter subject in 2005 I have been employed in various roles within the sector, most recently as designation adviser at English Heritage and as senior conservation officer at Greenwich council. I teach undergraduate courses in philosophy and architectural history, and as of 2015 I am senior lecturer and subject co-ordinator on the historic building conservation programme at Oxford Brookes University. I also work freelance as an architectural tour guide.