It is not an architecture book, although it received the Book Prize of the Academy of Architecture in November 2023. The care of things, by Jérôme Denis and David Pontille (La Découverte, 2022), is an immersion in the world of maintenance, this modest art of making things last with strong ecological and political significance. The sociological essay supports the thinking of architects, more and more of themselves wanting to offer new life to existing buildings, instead of demolishing them to build new ones.
“The book circulated a lot in architecture schools. The students saw it as a way to adapt their profession to the issues raised by the climate crisis, the depletion of resources and the shortage of housing, testifies Jérôme Denis. Rethinking the present building to meet contemporary needs appears to them as a more virtuous and pragmatic way of creating, the antithesis of spectacle architecture, of artistic gesture which is often immodest and masculine. »
This was also the purpose of the exhibition “Preserve, adapt, transmit”, organized by the Pavillon de l’Arsenal a year ago, where forty-four Parisian projects for transforming the existing were presented. Recall that, according to the last global state of buildings and construction reportpublished in 2022, construction represents 40% of global carbon emissions and that demolition produces much more CO₂ than rehabilitation.
Do not destroy but transform, this has been the leitmotif for twenty-five years of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, awarded the 2021 Pritzker Prize “for their approach of sobriety and generosity”. Lacaton & Vassal, to whom we owe the reinvention of the Palais de Tokyo or the creation of the FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais on the site of the former Dunkirk shipyards. Committed to saving residential buildings from the 1960s-1970s, which an urban renovation policy condemns to being razed and replaced, the two architects, with their colleague Frédéric Druot, distinguished themselves for the first time in 2011, by transforming the Bois-le-Prêtre tower, an unsanitary HLM bar on the edge of the ring road, in the 17e district of Paris, in spacious and bright accommodation, each with a winter garden.
“Every time we can revive a building, it’s a victory,” also argues Patrick Rubin, co-founder, with his brother, Daniel, of the Canal Architecture agency. While his generation was thinking about building the new city, he was one of those who, from the 1980s, invested in wastelands, disused buildings following the deindustrialization initiated by the first oil crisis, in 1973-1974. “Industrial constructions are very intelligent, greets the architect. They have high ceilings, large openings and have no interior load-bearing walls. So many assets which multiply the possibilities of transformation. »
You have 69.74% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.