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YES, TO CONSERVE IS TO TRANSFORM

by Suzanne Belaieff

The city, with its juxtaposition of signs, seems reconstruction. Such conditions inevitably lead easily transmissible of architectural culture.
made from an accumulation of architectures. to aesthetic and political questioning. Modernism, which needed machines and,
Overloaded with signs and visions, market values above all rationality, by imagining constructive
are the expression of architectural interventions. Redefinitions bring us also to redefine our simplicity without ornament, favoured the
To work in the city, architects must reflect upon thoughts. Yes, to preserve is to transform, “to superficiality shared by the Modernists and
the city! Indispensable for the purposes of urban build on what it brought to us but to build again”. the architects of the Beaux-Arts. In a shared
architecture. Those purposes, in the expression Yes, it is architecture. The architecture of the field, the generalist engineer and the generalist
of the Modern Movement, were to advocate a city, made up of functions, symbols, forms, architect go beyond the usual framework
break with the old order, paying no heed to the landscapes of networks and houses, is a critical, of their profession, a breakaway desired
fact that it was inseparable from the old culture. political and cultural issue - it must share itself and organised by law; the engineers remain
The moral order and Monumentalism of the with the citizens. The public constitutes the tradesmen, contrary to the architects, thus
state engendered the missed rendez-vous of urban space, a continuous public space, and creating a split. An architect who does not know
modernity, ignoring the conflict of the old and the determines private real estate land! plants, nor knows how to work bricks without
new in the domain of the arts; the behaviour of knowing what material they come from, cannot
humans must, therefore, be restored to overcome For an Architect, the “clinical field” is that of the express creative pleasure, the energy of life!
the Crisis of the City, a crisis that highlights its construction site and not the graphic perfection
vitality; utopias are the indispensable remedies of the plan! The Industrial Revolution rejected “The convulsions of Eastern Europe teach us
or the recommendation of a necessary ethical the builder/architects and fostered the most- that the reconstitution of continuity requires
taking into account
what has happened!”
Of course you have
to turn the page but
before that, you have
to read it! Creation
inhabited by the
freedom of critical
thought, essential at a
time when technology
is no longer the
place of invention:
this situation of
abandonment is
not only physical
but applies to our
souls. Architecture,
even the newest,
is in a position of
confrontation or
encounter between
identity, tradition and
novelty. That’s what
makes it modern.
This is why the city
is not the territory
of the architect but
rather that of his
responsibility.

© depositphotos/gianliguori Excerpts from Chemetov,
The Territory of the Architect

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