International Congress on “Maintenance, Repair and Rehabilitation of Property”

An international congress on "Maintenance, Repair and Rehabilitation of Property" will be held at the Hofburg Congress Centre in Vienna on 21 and 22 June 2007.

The congress will not address the issue of monuments and their restoration. Rather, it will bring together decision-makers, architects, planners, craftspeople, building industry experts and estate agents with the aim of highlighting tenable investment options and amortisation models for the purchase and use of existing property. These options and models are justified by their return on investment and by the fact that they maintain the frequently undervalued identity and characteristic quality of such property. The possible solutions shown are intended to help redefine the parameters that are used to draw the borderline between preservation on the one hand, and demolition and subsequent construction of a new building on the other.

Since the quality of historic monuments, as well as that of World Heritage sites (such as historic towns and cultural landscapes) will largely depend on the preservation status of the "secondary" architectural property that surrounds them, and since buildings located within buffer zones will become increasingly important, this topic is also of great interest to preservationists.