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A. Aigner:
"Transformation Unwanted! Heritage-making and its effects in Le Corbusier's Pessac estate.";
in: "Consuming Architecture: On Occupation, Appropriation and Interpretation of Buildings", issued by: Maudlin, D. and Vellinga, M.; Routledge, London, 2014, ISBN: 978-0-415-82499-6, 70 - 88.

Scant attention is paid in architectural discourse to the way buildings (physically and symbolically) change over time: above all in the case of modernist `masterpieces´. Forty years after Philippe Boudon´s pioneering study Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier´s Pessac Revisited (1972 [1969]) documenting the transformation from pristine art-objects to adapted, lived-in homes, this study adresses the site´s `return to the original state´. From the perspective of critical cultural sociology, the process of `purifying´ preservation is presented here as a cultural struggle in which a normative aesthetic (implicitly incorporating notions of architecture as `original´ and `correct´ habitation) is enforced against the `bad taste´ of culturally destitute residential groups. On the one hand, this paper attempts to elucidate the requirements and conditions essential to the process of `inappropriate´ transformation `from below´ - here termed as `vernacular-isation´. On the other hand, based on empirical data, it analyses the socio-cultural process of `heritage-isation´, which recently culminated in (unsuccessful) UNESCO candidatures in 2009 and 2011. It addresses the mechanisms of value production as well the question, which actors are involved in the making of heritage and what impact does the estate´s `second life´ as heritage have on the social context?

architecutre, appropriation, consumption of architecture, transformation, dwelling, architecture sociology, Le Corbusier, Pessac, Bourdieu

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315813523