Past and present: a creative dialogue

UNESCO Courier, Sept, 1997 by Jacques Rigaud

The problem of reconciling the safeguarding of cultural sites of historic interest with the creation of a new, vital architecture is one that is peculiar to our own times. For centuries, indeed for thousands of years, buildings of various kinds were erected in a medley of styles without any thought being given to respect for the past. While the attraction of some sites lies in their homogeneity and harmony, the Place des Vosges in Paris, for instance, the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome or the Campo in Siena, the charm of many cities such as Prague, Venice, Naples or Rome resides precisely in the way that a wide variety of buildings stand there side by side.

The fact that such contrasts fail to shock us may perhaps be due to our awareness that, behind the appearance of dissimilarity, there is an underlying unity to the architectural heritage. We are conscious that, between the Doric column and the buildings of Andrea Palladio or Christopher Wren, between the Roman basilica, Istanbul's Hagia Sophia and Romanesque art, and between the Pantheon, St Peter's in Rome and St Paul's Cathedral in London, there are just as many ties of kinship and continuity as there are breaks in tradition. However much they may differ or even clash, the successive styles somehow fit in with one another and get along together. It is worth remembering that until the nineteenth century respect for the heritage was unknown in Europe. Our forebears had no hesitation on religious, political or aesthetic grounds in building a cathedral in the middle of the mosque of Cordoba or knocking down the Louvre of Charles V to create the Cour carree, which they did with a kind of "innocence" quite devoid of scruples about the heritage.

Attitudes have changed. We have gradually come to appreciate the irreplaceable value of what we have inherited from the past, a realization that has become global in scale with the "world heritage" concept that UNESCO has succeeded in putting across. There is, however, another reason for this shift in outlook. Since the end of the last century, art in all its forms has undergone a number of radical changes which aesthetic factors alone cannot fully explain. Industrial, urban civilization has profoundly altered the design and structure of towns as well as construction techniques and materials.

* Changing attitudes

The results have been twofold: on the one hand, the wholesale destruction of monuments and sites at the very time when a consciousness of the heritage - at first concerned only with preserving major buildings of symbolic significance - was emerging; and on the other, the untimely onslaught of materials and forms that clashed with those of the past - steel, concrete and glass giving birth to a radically different kind of architecture, contrasting utterly with the buildings that have come down to us from former times.

It is for this reason that several opposing attitudes are represented in the modern approach to this issue. One consists in regarding certain sites, monuments or groups of buildings as sacrosanct and not tolerating any visible assertion of modernity. This is the case with the chateau of Versailles and with some cities that were destroyed by war, such as Warsaw, Nuremberg or Rouen, and have been rebuilt as faithful copies of their old selves. Another attitude is to advocate a type of construction that is in keeping with, or even a pastiche of; that which already exists. A third, conversely, is openly in favour of a dialogue between past and present buildings. There is, unfortunately, a fourth attitude, which I have no hesitation in calling indifferent or ignorant and which is the one that has done the greatest harm to certain grand urban vistas, as in the case of Brussels, London and Paris.

* Contrasting styles

The deliberate confrontation of ancient and modern can come in various forms. The new building can be discreetly fitted in: the audience chamber created for Paul VI in the Vatican by Pier Luigi Nervi is uncompromisingly modern in form but crouches in the shadow of St Peter's without having the slightest detrimental effect on that august site. By contrast, while the Pompidou Centre makes an assertive statement in the heart of old Paris, its proportions are in keeping with those of the buildings massed around it, and the piazza in front of it provides a smooth transition between it and its surroundings at the same time as being a successful urban space. Another, less controversial, example in France is Norman Foster's Carre d'art in Nimes. It faces the Roman temple known as the Maison carree, but far fom overwhelming it, seems to converse with it across two thousand years. In Germany, the Ludwig-Wallraf museums at the foot of Cologne cathedral do not flaunt themselves in any such face-to-face encounter, but give the impression that they were designed with this juxtaposition in mind.

The case of the Pei pyramid in the forecourt of the Louvre is a more subtle one. Classical in form, it might appear, though functional, to be incongruous in such a setting, but in fact its metal and glass construction, all reflections and transparencies, lends a bold and at the same time unassuming new touch to the classical facades of the palace. The same architect was successful in harmoniously integrating a new wing into the National Gallery in Washington. On another level, certain sensitively-sited major civil engineering projects such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or the Pont de Normandie in the Seine estuary manage to blend in admirably, thanks to the elegance and refinement of their forms.