
Un article sur la démolition de l’usine Gaupillat dans le dernier numéro du bulletin n° 53 du Ticcih.
Page 5 du bulletin n°53.
Encore merci à eux pour leur soutien.
http://www.mnactec.cat/ticcih/docs/1315373416_b53.pdf
France
Gaupillat gone: a testament to urban eradication
Antoine Monnet Président, Association La Fabrique
It’s true; we imagined a different fate for the Gaupillat factory in Bas Meudon (see TICCIH Bulletin #51), the last remnant of the Industrial Age in the Seine valley. For six years, we invested our time and energy in its future, conceiving a factory transformed as a cultural and social center that would benefit the neighborhood, the town, and its inhabitants.
We believed the fortuity of its transformation held out sufficient promise to resist the crass appetite of real estate promoters and political caretakers boxed in cubicles of virtual reality.
The demolition of the Renault factory on the Ile de Seguin announced the unflagging destruction of our immediate environment and architectural heritage. We discovered that only one edifice of that past remained: the Gaupillat factory. Its awesome brick chimney, Eiffelinspired scaffolding, sheds, pointed roofs and other peculiarities were suddenly unique in the Val de Seine.
Its preservation, renovation and transformation, we believed, could create both a jewel of that legacy and serendipity of its future.
The Association La Fabrique was born. In a few short months, it brought together formidable energy from multiple horizons: historians, architects, artists, students, specialists in social integration, teachers, neighbors and others.
History will retain little of the hours spent refining and enriching the project, seeking advice, studying similar experiences elsewhere, assembling and documenting its argumentation, and defending it locally and regionally. Acknowledgment of that shared effort is ours alone.
We demonstrated, despite the opposition, that thinking and acting differently was, in fact, possible – utopian, perhaps, but possible and
nearly achieved.
We aren’t so crazy. And we aren’t the only ones. Probing examples of intelligent reconversion of industrial properties do exist.
But now, they exist elsewhere, not in the Val de Seine.
Know that the last industrial building in the Val de Seine might still be standing…
…If the architect from Bâtiments de France had had the courage to resist political pressure, he might given his professionalism voice, and
expressed opposition its destruction.
…If the Ministry of Culture had ignored local political gamesmanship as they considered preservation work on the western borders of Paris, it might have listed the factory as a historical monument and protected its solitary importance.
…If the property owners had considered their own history for more than a fleeting moment, they might have chosen an offer other than the
most remunerative. They might have avoided the obliteration of any trace of their ancestor’s entrepreneurial legacy and local civiccharacter…
What we now accept of urbanization erased the past of a neighborhood, a town and a locality.
Granted: sometimes we don’t understand the stakes involved in decision-making. But all too often, we recognize that decisions are made backstage, where political complicity is construed of private ambitions locking horns and business interests seeking insipid common ground – before the curtain rises on a spectacle in which the public interest is too rarely present.
Often, as here, it is simply cut out.