Surveying and building conservation: the responsibility to exercise judgement
Posted on: 5 October, 2026
From heritage significance and carbon reduction to accessibility, viability and new technology, Associate Professor David Hourihan, Head of School – Real Estate and Innovation, argues that building conservation depends on informed professional judgement, not simply compliance with rules.
I recently had the great honour of representing the RICS Governing Council in giving the opening remarks at the 2026 RICS Global Building Conservation Conference.
In preparing my remarks, and reflecting as a Fellow of RICS on more than three decades in the profession, I found myself thinking about how much has changed.
Yet one thing has remained constant: the importance of professional judgement, underpinned by ethics, technical competence and a commitment to the public interest.
Those reflections brought me back to the recent RICS Harris Debate, ‘‘Ethical Surveying during a Housing Crisis’. Although the debate focused on housing, its underlying ethical questions apply equally strongly to building conservation.
Professional responsibility extends beyond the client
A central theme of the Harris Debate was that professional responsibility extends beyond compliance with technical rules. Standards provide the framework within which professional judgement operates, but ethical professionalism begins where mechanical compliance ends.
A surveyor may be instructed by a client, but professional advice can affect occupiers, communities, future owners and future generations.
The same is true of conservation. A recommendation about a historic building can affect its users, the surrounding community and those who will inherit responsibility for maintaining it. It can influence carbon emissions, accessibility, economic viability and the survival of historic fabric.
Understand the building before deciding what to do to it
Historic and traditional buildings do not necessarily behave like modern buildings. Their materials, construction and patterns of heat, air and moisture movement can be fundamentally different.
A measure that looks sensible on a spreadsheet can create another problem elsewhere. Improving airtightness without understanding ventilation can affect moisture and indoor air quality. Insulating historic fabric without understanding its hygrothermal behaviour can introduce risks that the intervention was intended to prevent.
Before deciding what a building needs, we need to understand how it works.
Proportionality and adaptive reuse
Ethical practice does not necessarily mean demanding the highest conceivable standard in every circumstance.
This is particularly relevant to conservation. If every intervention is treated as unacceptable because it changes historic fabric, we risk creating buildings that cannot meet contemporary needs. If every intervention is justified by energy performance, cost or commercial viability, we risk eroding the very significance we are trying to protect.
The ethical question is whether an intervention is necessary, proportionate, evidenced and appropriately designed to manage its consequences.
We should also become more comfortable with an idea that can still feel uncomfortable in conservation: sometimes the best way to conserve a building is to change it.
Former industrial buildings become homes or cultural spaces. Churches acquire new community uses. Offices are reconfigured rather than cleared away. Done well, this is not a retreat from conservation. It is conservation through continued use.
But adaptive reuse is not automatically good reuse, and carbon reduction should not become a universal justification for intervention. Heritage significance, carbon, cost, performance, accessibility, viability and usefulness may all be legitimate considerations. They will not always point in the same direction.
The people behind the building
Conservation also needs to consider the end user, rather than treating the person paying the professional fee as the only relevant interest.
A historic building may be significant because of its architecture, craftsmanship or collective memory, but also because people continue to use it.
A building that is beautifully preserved but inaccessible, unaffordable, unsafe or economically unsustainable raises difficult questions.
The public interest is rarely served by treating buildings as objects detached from the people who occupy them.
Existing buildings are part of the solution
We cannot meet future housing needs by concentrating only on new construction. A substantial part of our future is already standing.
Historic England identifies around 5.15 million homes in England (approximately one in five) as having been built before 1919.
The question cannot simply be whether to preserve or demolish. It must include whether we can reuse, retrofit, adapt, convert, repair, maintain and manage.
When demolition is proposed, we should ask what is being lost, not only in heritage terms, but in embodied carbon, material resources, community value and future options.
Technology can inform judgement, but cannot replace it
Technology is changing what surveyors can know about buildings. Geospatial surveying, laser scanning, digital modelling, thermal imaging and monitoring can reveal patterns of movement, deterioration, energy use and moisture behaviour.
But technology is not the judgement.
A digital model cannot determine what a community values about a building. A thermal image cannot decide whether an intervention is proportionate. An algorithm cannot resolve a conflict between retaining historic fabric and providing a viable contemporary use.
The same principle applies to artificial intelligence. AI may help professionals process information, test scenarios and identify patterns, but it also raises questions about transparency, bias, data quality and explainability.
The profession should therefore be interested not simply in what technology can do, but in what it should be used to do.
The past cannot stand still
There is a temptation to search for a formula that tells us when heritage should prevail, when intervention is justified, or when adaptation becomes acceptable. Such tools can be useful, but they cannot eliminate judgement.
Every building is different. Significance, construction, users, financial circumstances, climate risks and the consequences of intervention all vary.
Our responsibility is therefore neither to preserve buildings blindly nor to modernise them carelessly. It is to understand them first, then ask what they need next.
That may mean preservation, repair, adaptation, retrofit, conversion or a new use. In some circumstances, it may mean accepting that change is necessary to prevent a greater loss.
The ethical surveyor does not approach that decision with a predetermined answer. They bring evidence, professional standards, independence, proportionality and an awareness of the people who will live with the consequences.
Professional responsibility is not simply about following rules. It is about exercising judgement responsibly when the rules, the market, the client, the building and the public interest do not all point in the same direction.
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