Djabarouti, J., 2025.

Intangible Heritage Design: A Practical Guide

This book is an illustrated, practice-led guide for architects and conservation professionals who work with historic buildings, sites, and places. It responds to a growing demand across the sector to engage with intangible heritage - the skills, memories, meanings, and cultural expressions that shape, and are shaped by, the historic environment.

The book challenges the assumption that heritage-related design decisions - whether to repair, conserve, adapt, or build anew - are purely material. These decisions also shape how places are remembered, understood, and experienced. Drawing on the author's extensive research into the interface between tangible and intangible heritage, alongside a UKRI-funded secondment to Historic England, the book reframes intangible heritage as something that practitioners are already unavoidably working with - often instinctively - but without a clear framework or shared language to guide this engagement.

Avoiding dense theory or generalised discussion, the book is written in a professional yet accessible tone for time-pressured practitioners. It includes diagrams, photographs, quotes, and summary boxes that translate complex ideas into practical strategies for real-world projects. The aim is not to add further burden to professional workflows, but to highlight how intangible heritage is already being encountered - and how it can be more confidently recognised, supported, and safeguarded through a more conscious, contemporary conservation practice.

By doing so, the book contributes to a wider movement in UK policy and practice that positions heritage as dynamic, lived, and fundamentally entangled with people and place.