The notion of cultural heritage is in constant evolution. For many it remains linked to the conservation and maintenance of old buildings (monuments, castles, churches, fortifications, lodgings) or of fragments of cities. But starting in the 1970s, and with the thought that came out of the Venice school of architecture, the notion began to enlarge so to include other spatial fragments as well as sites that may not at first seem significant, but for which closer examination of their formation reveals a substantial relevance. This elaboration of the notion of cultural heritage introduces an immense and unpredicted importance in how we look at buildings, sections of landscaping, and the terrain in general. We can envision contemporary cultural heritage in the following way: -Physical Heritage – Premises: the built, the planted, the geology, the banal, the remarkable, the landscape, the forested masses, the glades, the works of art, the geography, the topography… - Visual Heritage – Regard: Critical analysis of remarkable places which include: exceptional lookouts on the near, middle, and remote distances, or, inversely, reference points that are not necessarily qualitative: towers, radio towers, works of art, large ensembles, voids, depth of field, visual obstructions… - Mental Heritage – "Histoire sourde du lieu": That which we no longer see: history of the transformation of a place and the marks left on the site or elsewhere – study of archives, cultural production (painting, photography, cinema), forbidden zones. This regard on contemporary cultural heritage relies, on one hand, on such tools as cartographic superposition, iconography, the study of the transformation of terrain, space, or building, and, on the other hand, on the observation of the premises, otherwise said, on the observation of the state of the totality of the contemporary landscape. With the word “totality” we understand a completeness in the observation that is enabled by the cooperation of competences (engineer, urban planner, architect, landscape artist, botanist, critical historian, sociologist, etc.) and the means of observation. We think to the developments of Hubert Damisch, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Virilio with regard to optics, as well as to photography – fixed image – and cinema – image in motion. Certain film directors – Chris Marker, Wim Wenders, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Tarkovski, Godard, and, more recently, Andreï Zviaguintsev and Abbas Kiarostami – deliver not only a strong sense of Mental Heritage (as Marker does in La jetée (The Pier) with the long terrace of Orly and the old Galerie de l’Evolution in the Jardin des Plantes), but they go so far as to displace the film’s subject onto that of architectural and landscape observation. For example, not a single architectural documentary on the Villa Malaparte was as effective at portraying the villa as was Godard in his film Le Mépris (Contempt). Similarly, there is not a single landscape documentary that illustrates with such visual impact and such premonition the threat of rising water levels on entire future generations than the lake scene does in Dersu Uzala (The Hunter). In addition to this optical contribution, certain films introduce the idea of a "Histoire sourde du lieu", which, in the manner of mental heritage of a space, develops in parallel with the film’s plot, and even surpasses it. This phenomenon is illustrated by Andrei Tarkovski in Stalker. I am thinking specifically of the anthology’s lateral traveling, passing from a sinister industrial zone to a forbidden green zone dominated by a wild and chaotic nature. This film preceded the disaster in Chernobyl by almost ten years, foreshadowing the nuclear threat and the ecological degradation of the planet. The method we applied to the project for the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire at Rochefort, recently completed, more concretely illustrates our idea. Here, we understand how the "Histoire sourde du lieu", combined with the regard, informs the project so to allow for a pertinent contemporary stratification. The reference points for the project are as follows: -The Pierre Loti home: a silent, almost bland exterior holding a spatial and cultural explosion inside (reconstitution of the five continents); -Memory of the Jacques Demy film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort), which, across the grid of the bar (veritable optical machine) posed upon the city’s central square allowed for a 360° visual of the city. After taking inventory of the state of the existing building, it was decided that the 18th-century facade would be preserved and treated as a mask, echoing the very homogenous facades of the city of Rochefort and the silence of the Pierre Loti home. Inside this wall, and set back from it, we installed a cutting-edge, three-dimensional framework that readily welcomes the new functions, generates contemporary spatiality, and organizes views of the city through the filter of the preserved wall (homage to the optical grid of Demy’s ephemeral bar). The seismic threat implies a dissociation from the existing and the addition. The sliding plates that marry the two eras generate a passage that evokes distance between the two types of construction: that of the 18th century and that of the 21st century. This break exposes the entire history of the city, as much from a mental point of view as from a physical one: the exhibition spaces dedicated to the different periods interpenetrate in a fluid space organized by the addition to and insertion into the preserved. The same procedure applies to two recent projects: the Avesnes sur Helpes courthouse (2007), where the unearthing of a Vauban curtain wall gives dynamic to the project as well as an optical device that benefits from the visual podium of the fortification; and that of the Struthof Center (2006-2007), which draws on a 150-meter underground tunnel built by deported prisoners, thus fusing the physical, visual, and mental heritage. And so, it would seem that there now exists a new way to understand a space that is no longer necessarily mimetic but mental. The accentuation of ecological threats, the indisputable notion of sustainable development coupled with a more cultivated technique for analyzing the space to be treated must contribute to making a generation of projects that are inventive and innovative for tomorrow’s cultural heritage.

Pierre-Louis FALOCI

Paris, 7 March 2007