In reality, our colonial architecture represents only the miniscule empowered minority who are recipients of Macaulay's English education. Amos Rapoport for years has championed the cause of studying the built-environment through the eyes of a behavioural scientist. Yet the conservation architecture is only obsessed with embalming of the architectural fabric of heritage or its perfect prosthetic reproduction. The focus has shifted from the bottomline to the technique. Even conservationists' celebrated adaptive reuse of old structures has its own implications in the human realm.
Conservation is a refuge for the wealthy.
After all we do not even have the wherewithal to maintain the buildings we put on preservation lists. For conservation to work and be effective, it is important to address these basic issues of identifying the right heritage, understand the interactive human perception of the structure and to legislate realistic laws and methods for conservation. We need to reinvest in trying to figure out how new architectural can be bettered to truly represent and serve our present realities. It is a fallacy to really believe that our past can be wipe out simply by knocking down our old architecture. Like all the art forms we too can build on our collective consciousness of history.