BOV / The Windrose

 

Our era is righfully marked by the omnipresence of climate issues in the media. Architects all over the world are tackling this and understanding the extent of their impact on the environment a little better every day.
And it is catastrophic.
 
Paradoxically, our nemesis is intimately linked to the questioning of our practice and our (bad) habits: yes, we build better, more efficiently, more passive, but we continue to build. The profession is more and more divided on this subject. The concept of the “right to build” emerged to those who want to regulate new constructions, to which they prefer the rehabilitation of existing buildings.
 
Should we be confined to this binary dichotomy of urban development?
Keeping development within urban boundaries is a preferred option in order to protect an increasingly diminished nature but can we also imagine another architectural future in which new ideas would be created by drawing on the carbon heritage of the city already built?
This project seeks to address the issue of heritage in terms other than those, more classic, romantic or even symbolic, of architectural stylistics. Not wishing in any way, and even on the contrary, to denigrate history, our approach is to assess the value of a building’s survival potential beyond its aesthetics but really on the basis of its consumed carbon.
The building that concerns us is a minor work of a major architect: Adrien Blomme.
We are not talking about one of his masterpieces here, but rather a construction. A building that does not appear in his monograph.
Moreover, we are not talking about destruction either. We are talking about reincarnation: in the long term, an unloved, abandoned, unmanageable building is doomed to disappear. On the other hand, a redesigned building, redesigned in order to continually meet the needs of its time, can be eternal. Like its carbon.
 
We want to meet contemporary, environmental and cultural specifications with the material elements that Adrien Blomme left us in order to be able to celebrate his adage: “Architecture has become functional. The façade is now just a reflection of the plan, treated rationally. ”