Paysage, architecture rurale, territoire : de la prise de conscience patrimoniale à la protection

• Main Author: Arlette Auduc
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication 2012-04-01
• Series: In Situ : Revue de Patrimoines
• Subjects: rural heritage; architecture; landscape; historic monuments; gardens; sites
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/insitu/2737

For a long time, heritage protection in France meant the protection of historic monuments, exceptional buildings “of national interest for history or for art”, as the law of 1887 formulated it. From 1887 to 1914, however, the notion of what a historic monument might be was considerably broadened. Attachment to significant traces of the built past began to encompass ‘objects’ of increasing diversity and from different historical periods and ‘national’ interest was no longer the exclusive yardstick. Rural architecture benefited little from measures of protection, however, the procedures elaborated for historic monuments being ill suited to these new objects. Rural architecture is an architecture which evolves. Constantly modified, rebuilt and adapted to continuous changes in rural life, it is very different from the historic monument. The rural dwelling is not a book-inspired production and may indeed be seen as the antithesis of the unique work of art. Nonetheless some examples of rural architecture have been given protection (‘classement’ or, more frequently, ‘inscription’), examples often selected for their ethnological values, under the influence of Georges-Henri-Rivière. For forty years, the services of the ‘Inventaire général’ have been studying rural architecture in their research programmes and it is around such inventory and survey work that, inspired by better understanding, new ideas have emerged as to how this type of heritage can be protected. Today, these ideas focus not so much on the individual built object as on the territory to which it belongs. When this territory is an inhabited one, it is artificial to separate the building from its landscape. It is part of this landscape, structuring it and giving it life. If this more holistic approach is adopted, it follows that the protection of rural architecture must be capable of continuity and evolution on a large scale, associated with the preservation of the landscape as a whole and the valorisation of the territory. Forms of protection different from those based on the notion of the historic monument are possible. Before the Ministry of Culture, other ministries have already addressed this problem, sensitive to the protection of landscapes with criteria which have little to do with the aesthetic ones at the origins of monument protection.