Heritage, patrimony and creation
The constructed environment, whether historical or contemporary, and the successive stratifications of the city and landscapes, whose complexity poses endless challenges to their reading and interpretation, are, now more than ever, current issues. The inscription of the architectural project into an existing environment, thought on city and its fluxes, and requests for a sustainable approach to territories all pose questions about the insertion of new projects in the inherited city. To think the project and the city today in a renewed vision of our lifestyles is to insert the project in a global reflection that considers the patrimonial dynamics that underlie the transformation of territories.
One can adopt several approaches and tools to work on knowledge and modes of representation and transmission. Many of these resources are used simultaneously in research projects and education. The DIM MAP project, in collaboration with the Foundation for Cultural Heritage Sciences (Fondation des Sciences du Patrimoine), brings chemical physics and the human and environmental sciences closer in Ile-de-France. Through the study of objects and the materiality of œuvres, this interdisciplinary approach orients research toward the historicity of the works’ material, an essential question for buildings. Our fruitful relationship with the Foundation and the teams located in this region must be encouraged and reinforced.
The two master’s degree programs at the ENSAV place research at their center: the program “Historical gardens, heritage, and landscape” (JHPP for Jardins historiques, patrimoine et paysage) holds ties with the ComUE Paris-Seine’s EUR – ties which promise new interdisciplinary and fruitful collaborations; the program “Architecture and its Territories” (AST for Architecture et ses territoires) in partnership with the Paris-Saclay University is evolving toward restoration sciences and cultural heritage expertise. Ultimately, these programs will become part of ENSAV’s project to create specific degrees. Also, new pedagogical and research-related perspectives on modes of representation allow for the transformation of our existing knowledge. Feasibility studies, plans, prospective initiatives, studies, the diversity of urban scales that research considers are all levers to study places by grasping their complexity.
Heritage and sustainable development of territories
To understand the issues at the heart of the preservation of urban and rural environments, the transmission of these environments within changing regulatory framework and their potential for adaption when faced with the evolution of societies and the threatened equilibrium of living beings, requires an in-depth analysis of sites, buildings, or objects and of the dynamics that marked their evolution. We must also question certain urban and built forms, or certain territories and landscape projects, that are neglected today – architecture of reconstruction, urban parks, suburban zones – as well as take a concrete approach to territorial and urban planning to think about their permanence. Strategies of economic development propose temporalities that do not always coincide with the careful reflection involved in a reconversion process. The relationship that inhabitants share with old buildings that they now inhabit (“Ways to Live in the Eighteenth Arrondissement,” “Façons d’habiter le XVIIIe arrondissement”), analyses of urban and environmental complexes designed or transformed in the twentieth century (historical and environmental diagnostics of the JHPP master’s program), the capacity for adaptation to new environmental regulations, and the energy issue (“Architectures of Reconstruction in Val-de-Loire,” “Architectures de la reconstruction en Val-de-Loire”) are all questions that we want to address in nuanced and skillful ways.
Questioning the processes of patrimonial construction
The development of cultural heritage does not necessarily come from the manifest worth of monuments and sites. It evolves depending on the priorities of different groups at different times, according to what is considered worthy of interest and representative of shared values. This analysis highlights the mechanisms at work in enhancement operations and explains destruction and neglect. Among our research actions, “the critical rereading of the Florence Charter” on public urban historical parks was inspired by a renewed interest for the matter (which was stimulated by ICOMOS International), and the comparison of this analysis to research led on the Venice Charter. The extension of the notion of cultural heritage to “unremarkable” architecture is an opportunity to question the relation between works of art and interior design with the conception of space. This question can be tied to more general ones regarding different ways of intervening in favor of restauration operations on nineteenth and twentieth century monuments. Finally, the tourism activated by these “memories” (images or objects that strongly evoke popular tradition) shows how objects and their multiple commercial variations are part of the process by which buildings enter the realm of cultural heritage.
Cultural and tourism developments
Today, world metropolisation phenomena are analyzed through the prism of tourism fluxes that guarantee an economic development and enhancement that will safeguard these urban structures. But sometimes these actions lead to excessive use that modify places to respond to demands from the tourism industry. Between protection and alteration, transmission and evolution, the issue of tourism development poses questions about the tourism-related promotion of sites, the evolution of equipment, and the conservation of urban structures. Our participation to the Designing Heritage Tourism Landscapes International Network, our offer to organize a workshop on tourism and heritage and a symposium “Cultural landscapes, new readings or territories,” and our participation to the Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape Biennial in 2019 are all opportunities to develop a set of questions that will be shared by numerous research teams. Neighborhoods, publics spaces, and their emblematic buildings undergo new hybridizations of uses and experience new fluxes. Behind their apparent stability, some urban landscapes experience profound changes. Meanwhile, other sectors that have officially been “museified” are progressively transformed to strengthen their attractiveness. A retrospective analysis of the heritage project carried out in the twentieth century could offer a renewed outlook on these ongoing dynamics in order to understand their potential and fragilities. Our collaboration with the Conseil départemental des Yvelines (Departmental Council of the Yvelines) in our survey of a representative panel of colleagues will engage the AST master’s students in in-depth studies of recent buildings and will contribute to raising the local public’s consciousness of its own territory.
Professional cultures, cultural mediations and transfers
Analyzing a corpus of publications provides ways to understand the phenomena of acculturation, of knowledge transmission, and of modes of representing space. Among these, the study of museum publications allows one to analyze the relation between interior designers and conservation professionals. This analysis gives rise to questions around models, modes of diffusion, the rhetoric of each professional category, and the way in which these categories can enter into dialogue to serve an interior design project. With this interprofessional goal, the research project “How to read the publication Aujourd’hui : art et architecture” questions both the publication’s own modes of communication and the creation of a new relationship between art and architecture. Finally, various media are analyzed in their informative role (to relate events, to help understand a city) and their capacity to constitute new categories of a scientific corpus. Led with the ENSPV, which has naturally become a closer partner, the project around the archives of twentieth-century landscape designers questions the development of cultural heritage while developing tools to collect, analyze and mediate these professional cultures. The study of cultural transfers around garden expertise, and notably France, Italy, and Germany’s developing ties in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributes to the reflection on the reappropriation of old processes to face environmental challenges.
This area of research is coordinated by Stéphanie de Courtois.
