The Ethics of Dealing with Heritage : A Comparative Study of Ruskin, Haussmann, and Giovannoni

This thesis surveys these 3 key studies of architectural heritage and urban transformations by questioning the moral aspect of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, John Ruskin and Gustavo Giovannoni. While heritage is often treated as a technical or aesthetic issue, this work argues it is primarily an ethical one: decisions about what to preserve, destroy, or reinterpret shape collective memory, social texture, and the future identity of cities. With the help of philosophical ethics and architectural theory, the study articulates a critical framework based on typology, tectonics, and topology, to interrogate the values embedded in urban form. Architectural history perspectives of Paris, Subiaco, and Venice collectively evidence the ethical argument that each of the three men expounds-from Haussmann's utilitarian rationalism to Ruskin's moral idealism, to Giovannoni's calibrated pragmatism. These models are then discussed and reframed in light of ancient and modern philosophers. In the end, the thesis also calls for a rethinking of preservation as not just a nostalgic or static act but as an ethical negotiation that continues to evolve. It suggests that architects ought to be not just designers but moral agents-who mediate between past and future, within memories and transformations because the ones who make impact like Haussmann, Ruskin and Giovannoni influence future designers of our world. In so doing, it argues for an urban practice underpinned by ethical clarity, historical responsibility, and cultural continuity.