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Talks and Poster Presentations (without Proceedings-Entry):

A. Aigner:
"Transformation Unwanted! Critical Notes on the Preservation of Modernist Social Housing - Case Study Pessac";
Talk: Konferenz "Fixed? Architecture, Incompleteness and Change", School of Architecture, Design and Environment, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK (invited); 2011-04-07 - 2011-04-08.



English abstract:
Scant attention is paid in architectural discourse to the way buildings change over time. Often there is no acceptance - above all in the case of `authentic masterpieces´ or structures that have been listed as cultural monuments. The earlier working class housing estates by Le Corbusier in Pessac (1924-1926) and Lège-Cap-Ferret (1923-1924) are pithy examples of this. Residents´ own adaptations, generally interpreted by experts and people of taste as the erroneous interventions of `philistines´, have been combated as an evil that must be eradicated since the estates were recognised as cultural heritage sites. Some 40 years after the transformation of the estate buildings was documented by Phillipe Boudon, interest has now shifted to an aesthetic `reconquest´ of the buildings - not as the triumph of connoisseurs over bad taste but rather as a cultural conflict and an institutional practice aimed at enforcing a normative aesthetic (implicitly incorporating notions of architecture as `original´ and `correct´ habitation) and disciplining `culturally destitute´ residential classes. On the one hand, this paper attempts to elucidate the requirements and conditions essential to the process of vernacularization in avant-garde social housing. On the other hand, it demonstrates a `return to the original state´ to be a cultural process structured by power and class relations. The aim of the paper is to increase awareness for residents as cultural subordinates and encourage experts confronted with the care and preservation of such architecture to be more critically self-reflective in their approach.

Keywords:
Vernacularization, modernist architecture, avant-garde social housing, appropriation, transformation, preservation, cultural heritage, symbolic violence, Pierre Bourdieu, Le Corbusier

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.