Rehabilitate, transform, enhance, rather than razing the existing, rather than building. This is the only possible path, today, for responsible architecture. It is only by reasoning in this way that the building sector can hope to significantly reduce the currently colossal level of its carbon emissions, and reverse the toxic dynamic of land artificialization of which it is the instrument.
You just have to contemplate the incessant ballet of cranes which animate our metropolitan landscapes to understand that this is not the direction that things are taking, which tends to be confirmed by a Senate report issued on November 9, which calls into question the policy of The objective of zero net artificialization by 2050. But it is the role of architectural journals, schools and cultural institutions to hold the bar.
The award, Monday, November 18, of the Silver Square 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, pioneer of wooden architecture in France to whom we owe the fabulous housing complex La Pièce pointue, in Blanc-Mesnil (Seine-Saint-Denis), the jury distinguished a project for which the architects claim to have intervened as little as possible.
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Blend the building into the landscape
Three objectives guided them: to 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 1980s had partly distorted; blend the building as delicately as possible into the landscape; allow visitors to make the most of the view. An approach that is both humble, but carried out with loving care by this couple of architects whose male side, David Delvaux, passionately campaigns for architects to stop building, and the female, Claudia Delvaux, heritage architect, supervised the splendid restoration of Eileen Gray's villa E1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (Alpes-Maritimes).
The price of the first work drives home the point. 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 further than the commission. While this was limited to an energy renovation operation (the original building, built in the 1980s, was a thermal sieve), the project managers rethought the organization of the courses, taking inspiration from interviews carried out with the children, and equipped the courtyard with a red metal courtyard which brings lightness and cheerfulness to the whole.
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