Monumental Ordinary: Almost As Found

The contribution reflects on the as found combining a theoretical vision on reuse by two Italian researchers with the operational praxis by the French architecture office GENS. Peripheral contexts, far from the big historical cities, are full of plural and minor histories. Reuse in these places requires a strategy to design new imaginaries and desires to reconfigure artefacts and the cultural context. It is a question of building legacies that collect past memories, translating them into a space for the future.The project uses narration as a tool for operating on the objet trouvé with precise but pungent actions: the narrative welds together tradition and pastiche, amnesia and memory, industrial and agricultural tone, ornament and essentiality. GENS has been working with the ordinary to construct new identities.The Chapiteaux project (2018) in Avricourt turns the dailyness into a monument to the dailyness (“Art is what makes life more interesting than art”, Robert Filiou): a derelict barn is taken from its likely destruction to be converted into the village bakery.The strategy consists of inventing a story by using elements of traditional architecture: portico, colonnade, capitals supporting a wooden coffered ceiling, hypostyle hall. Past architectural figures are brought into play to blur old and new and set up ambiguity: from barn to the big hall, scattered with “capitals” as if they would have always been there, “a new order capable of generating heresies”. However, if the architecture aspires to the ennobling of space through the facetious “reuse” of history, the bakery housed within it brings us again to the power of the ordinary to become a monument itself.The overlapping of languages and tones that continually contaminate “high” and “low” becomes the design modality to construct new legacies of the contemporary. Chapiteaux, while remaining concealed in the intérieur, reconfigures the relationship between ordinary and monumental, between building and territory. The project gives us a space as a new hollow symbol, able to host, to make itself available, to reconnect “space and society”. New “capitals” as architectural symbols creep silently into the found places to indicate possible trajectories of the architecture of contemporary reuse, almost as found.