When in 1964 leading restorers, architects and archaeologists came together in Venice to agree on international standards of conservation and restoration of monuments, probably no one was suspecting the creative spirit and normative power coming to spread from that pleasantly unideological declaration of principles they signed on the 31^st of May. With the Venice Charter the group around Piero Gazzola, Roberto Pane and Raymond Lemaire established the most widely recognised document of monument preservation and the most influential to date, even if the principles outlined in the preamble and 16 articles have remained legally non-binding until today.

Nonetheless the daily practice of architects and monument preservationists dealing with built heritage has become more complex in the last 50 years and neither the Venice Charter nor the connecting Policy Papers of Washington, Xi’an, Valletta and o. describe completely and systematically all aspects of building in historical fabric.

This Website intends to extend the principles of the most important documents on monument preservation by guidelines concerning the building in existing fabric and merge them into an overall term system. Based on the original texts and on an analysis of their keywords, a screen-shaped strategy model has been created in which five principles (ECRAN), nine strategies and about 60 recommendations for guidance reorganize the dealing with historical building fabric. As a result the act of tradition once more emphasizes the necessary creative link between the existing and the genesis: to clear the Old, to root the New – future by origins.

By means of the strategy model it is possible for the first time to analyse construction projects in existing (listed) fabric according to specific criteria and typify them graphically.  A long-term goal is a “screen”-based, CAD-designed database with exemplary type-buildings and their interlinking with rebuild-specific construction price lists.