PARTIE 2 - Icomos

Theme 2
Session 3
INTRODUCTION
Vice-Chair
Vice-président
SAVOIR HABITER, RÉUTILISER,
RÉINVENTER
ADAPTING TO SUSTAINABLE LIVING,
EXPERTISE IN RE-USE, EXPERTISE IN BUILDING
John Hurd
President of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Earthen Architectural
Heritage (ICOMOS UK)
Président du Comité scientifique international de l'ICOMOS sur le patrimoine de
l'architecture en terre (ICOMOS UK)
hurdcon@yahoo.co.uk
As vice chair of this session on the programme for
adaptive reuse, “defining the limits of carrying capacity
for heritage assets”, I am not on solid ground and
therefore my brief introduction will be a personal view
and a philosophical view of the architecture that we
will consider and importantly the cultural framework
in which it exists.
I confess to being something of a Luddite. A Luddite
was a textile artisan in 19th Century Britain who
was a lover of the wooden loom and who destroyed
infernal modern machines. I love the old and until quite
recently, the new, especially the new architecture of
the metropolis not only left me cold, but it frightened
me and took me far from my comfort zone.
When I pass a building designed by Mies Van der Rohe,
I look down at the pavement and pass as quickly as I
am able. The same is not true of all buildings of the
modern era, as I walk along 42nd street in New York
I am capable of standing for a long time wondering
at the beauty of grand central station or the Chrysler
building and delighting in their architectural detail and
decoration, no matter how redundant this may be. The
impact of the greater shape of the building is softened
and in some way humanised by the juxtaposition of a
range of materials and their details.
I was in Helsinki last year, and experienced a great leap
forward in the appreciation of modern architecture,
having been given a compulsory tour of the work of
Alvar Aalto. As the tour, under the guidance of Kirsti
Kovanen developed, I began to understand the quality
in the holistic approach of this very sensitive architect
and the materials that he chose to use, revealing
interesting detail in what would once have been boring
rectangles. I understood that Aalto was reaching out
for something new, an ideal of the modern life and
culture intended to be comfortable and practical
rather than challenging; my defences dropped.
If we look at my favourite city of New/old Delhi,
which had been developed as a colonial capital by
the British, I love the architecture of Lutyens, who
seemed to reflect and build on the great historic
city of Shahjehanabad, which surrounded the British
empire’s axis of the Rajpath. Delhi was a city that was
developed around firm historic traditions and the
addition of a British colonial quarter seemed to be
not entirely shocking, but a grand synthesis of the
existing traditions, materials and decoration. For me,
there was a clear transmission that reflected and built
on tradition.
Here and now, I am obliged to consider the reason for
my years of dislike of very modern, boxlike architecture
and the answer lies in the use of materials.
It seems now that the old building materials, earth
[my specialism], wood, stone and brick, feel safe and
huggable, like a sort of safe haven, a pillar of reality
and this is a reasonable feeling. It keeps me in touch
with thousands of years of history, of empirical
understanding and development of styles with which I
feel comfortable. Steel, glass and concrete has perhaps
always felt cold and threatening to me.
So the question, which is slowly starting to unravel for
me, is why does one comfort and one threaten?
Politically and socially I am fairly radical, but in some
conditions of life I realise, with some shame, that I am
very conservative.
During my life I realise that I no longer belong to one
nation, I regard myself as a citizen of the world and feel
comfortable with the understanding that the world is
full of different cultures, cultures with diverse values
and diverse expressions in the traditional form of an
architecture that celebrates the differences.
This does not mean that I strive for “one world”
culture, indeed, I love to see a building that allows me
to define, in its style and decoration, the culture in
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LE PATRIMOINE, MOTEUR DE DÉVELOPPEMENT
HERITAGE, DRIVER OF DEVELOPMENT