UTILITAS Ltd., Built Heritage Conservation Research and Design Centre, was established in 1991, shortly after the relaunch in Romania of this field of activity, which earlier had gone through a stagnation period. In 1996, the society completed its field of activity with the Utilitas Publisher, whose main purpose is making the public conscious of the importance of built heritage. The built heritage, as an essential part of our common cultural inheritance, sends us through its values a message of history, culture and spiritual life. The historic buildings reflect a style and the characteristic concepts of an era, or show the evolution in time of the ideas that have governed over one place. In this way, Transylvania offers us a multifarious and extremely complex image, due to the long inter-ethnic cohabitation between the Romanian, Hungarians, Saxons, Ruthenian and Armenian, that has lead to creations of great value in the same region, under the common denomination of local tradition, but which, naturally, have conveyed their specificity to every historic building.

In 2007, the Utilitas Publisher launched the Transsylvania Nostra journal on built heritage, which gathers in every issue a collection of scientific materials which represent the results of research, conservation and rehabilitation work carried out by the specialists in this field for the protection of built heritage.

Among the edited publications, the scientific works and the ones destined for the general public are approximatively in equal number. Therefore, untill the year 2014, 57 popularising publications were edited, of which 54 being the Series of Historic Buildings in Transylvania. Other 79 are scientific publications, approaching a well defined topic: volumes of the scientific conferences like TUSNAD and Historic Structures, three dictionaries dedicated to historic load bearing structures and technical reports have been edited, along with the trimestrial Transsylvania Nostra Journal.