Valuable historical building materials from buildings which have been demolished for different reasons are collected, documented, archived and presented to the public in the archives. The building materials and objects are to be preserved as documents for historical craftsmanship. Thus they can be available for the different crafts and their education and further education courses. With the original materials historical techniques and traditional reparation methods can be learned and practiced. The objects of different materials and different times are a solid and original basis for the investigation of those historical building materials, their techniques of construction and processing

Each project partner has to build up an archive as far as possible. As a starting point the conditions in each country have to be analyzed. The content of the archives and the division according to the different materials depend on the existence of the historical objects.

After recovering the historic elements they are listed and described in the according forms. Beside they contain information on measures, material, form and function, as well as the provenience of the material. For this reason the Förderverein für Handwerk und Denkmalpflege e.V. – Rittergut Trebsen has created a form which can be used as a guideline by the project partners. It can be adapted to the different conditions of every country.

In the following example of a stocktaking form we have listed timber pillars from the 17th century recovered from an important building in Leipzig just before its demolition.

During the project every project partner has established a place for exhibition of historical building material. Here you can read a summary of all activities.