BY PHILIPPE TRÉTIACK
When it comes to prejudices, every one of us has a solid heritage. Indeed, the views recently expressed by a number of luminaries, each one them sporting an ex voto-style acronym (HM, ABF, Stap…) came as something of a surprise. Present for the round table organised by L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui at Paris’ Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine on 21 November 2011, Alexandre Gady, Jean-Marc Blanchecotte and Alain-Charles Perrot, flanked by the architects Nicolas Michelin and Rudy Riciotti, grabbed the question of heritage by the scruff of its venerable neck.
First impressions were curious. I imagined us pickled in heritage, “completely conserved”, tainted with the perverse kind of botulism that condemns the French to architectural paralysis. But these professionals were owning up to a tangible loss of power. According to Jean-Marc Blanchecotte, the redoubtable representative of the Paris Stap, “the civil servants responsible for both old monuments and the most contemporary of architectural masterpieces have to struggle on a daily basis with officials who apply a thousand-and-one ruses to destroy what only recently would have been conserved...”
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