Rehabilitate, transform, enhance, more than destroying what exists, more than building. This is the only possible path, today, for responsible architecture. Only by reasoning in this way can the construction sector hope to significantly reduce the currently colossal level of its carbon emissions and reverse the toxic dynamics of the artificialization of the land of which it is the instrument.
It is enough to contemplate the incessant ballet of cranes that animate our metropolitan landscapes to understand that this is not the direction things are going, as a Senate report issued on November 9 usually confirms, which calls into question the policy of the goal of zero artificialization. net by 2050. But the role of architectural magazines, schools and cultural institutions is to maintain the bar.
The award, on Monday, November 18, of the Place de la Plata to the rehabilitation of the upper station of the Salève cable car, in Monnetier-Mornex (Haute Savoie), by the Devaux et Devaux agency, goes in this direction. Chaired by Iwona Buczkowska, a pioneer of wooden architecture in France to whom we owe the fabulous La Pièce pointue housing complex, in Blanc-Mesnil (Seine-Saint-Denis), the jury distinguished a project in which the architects claim to have intervened as little as possible.
Combine the building with the landscape.
Three objectives guided them: rediscover the quality of the original architecture, that of the Swiss Maurice Braillard, who built the cable car in 1932, which a restoration carried out during the 80s had partially distorted; integrate the building as delicately as possible into the landscape; allowing visitors to make the most of the view. An approach at once humble, but lovingly carried out by this architectural couple whose male side, David Delvaux, passionately campaigns for architects to stop building, and the female side, Claudia Delvaux, heritage architect, oversaw the splendid restoration by Eileen Gray. villa E1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (Alpes-Maritimes).
The price of the first work makes it clear. Awarded to the renovation, by the Alt174 agency, of the Simone-Veil school in Lompret (North), it rewards the approach of these young architects who decided to go beyond the commission. Although it was limited to an energy renovation operation (the original building, built in the 1980s, was a thermal sieve), those responsible for the project rethought the organization of the courses, inspired by the interviews carried out with the children, and equipped the patio with a red metallic patio that brings light and joy to the complex.
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