Permanent protection of the monument is this stage of technical work, which precedes or sometimes is carried out simultaneously with finishing and artistic conservation works.
Works related to the permanent protection of a monument almost always enter the specificity of engineering and construction works, the proper determination of which plays a particularly important role in the process of strengthening and stabilizing endangered buildings.
Engineering and construction issues in their content in works related to the protection of monuments are very extensive and, as follows from further chapters, it is sometimes very complicated. Generally speaking, works related to the protection of a permanent monument can be usually reduced to two basic tasks:
a) removing or weakening the factors that pose a threat to the monument, whose sources lie outside the object,
b) securing or making the object itself resistant to destructive factors.
The performance of permanent protection procedures in each case is closely related to the prior recognition and development of the protection concept and the indication of technical means, which should be applied for this purpose in a specific case without prejudice to the historical value of the monument.
The group of permanent protection procedures is represented by many technically and organizationally diverse means of operation. With regard to the object itself, technical and conservation measures of a permanent nature can be classified as extragenic and introgenous interventions.
Extragenous intervention measures usually involve the introduction of permanent protection measures outside the monument, in order to preserve the materials or structural system in an authentic state, using the protection of the monument against the possibility of further destruction as a result of the surrounding environment, and especially climatic factors.
In terms of this type of measures, all kinds of external shields are most often used, auxiliary structures not related to the historic layout are introduced or protection is applied by means of another building covering a given object. This type of treatment concerns in most cases valuable threads of historic walls, fragments of a building or some of its assemblies, and sometimes entire buildings of unique historical or cultural value, especially when their protection is associated with the need to create an appropriate microclimate or access to research or permanent exhibition. In this way, some remains of the Romanesque and Gothic walls on the Wawel Hill were secured, Romanesque walls in the church of St. Wojciech in Krakow, relics of pre-Romanesque walls in Wiślica and others.
Technical procedures of introgenic nature are aimed at removing damages and threats inside the structure and thus restoring the damaged, loosened or missing masonry units, the ability to fulfill their original structural and utility functions.
Introgenous technical intervention may also be dictated by the need to increase the load-bearing capacity of elements in connection with their intended adaptation to meet new functions, as well as in cases, when new operating conditions have arisen in relation to the original purpose of the structure.
Treatments of this kind are sometimes used in these cases as well, ,when there is a need to make technical adjustments to the existing spatial layout due to static and structural requirements, what could happen eg. in the case of rebuilding the load-bearing parts and changing their static purpose in relation to this, which they originally fulfilled, or due to a change in the mechanical properties of the masonry materials used.