L’architecture administrative de la Bretagne contemporaine : miroir de l’herméneutique nationale ou totem identitaire ?

From the end of the Second World War up the mid-1980s, administrative Brittany experienced a slow but profound renewal of its places of power. Until this period, public architectural commissions in Brittany had remained closely linked to a few important local figures, favouring a broadly-based eclec...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Périg Bouju
Format: Article
Language:fra
Published: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication 2018-10-01
Series:In Situ
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/insitu/17294
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:From the end of the Second World War up the mid-1980s, administrative Brittany experienced a slow but profound renewal of its places of power. Until this period, public architectural commissions in Brittany had remained closely linked to a few important local figures, favouring a broadly-based eclecticism, from the Beaux-Arts style to Art Deco regionalism. As early as 1944, however, the immensity of the task of reconstruction, and political as well as ideological issues of spatial planning, implied a requalification of the actors, leaving little room for local debates. Divergent interests between the State and local communities, whilst exacerbating the dreams of local designers, led together to a redefinition of traditional representations of power. In this competition for pre-eminence, architects played a leading role. Logics of efficiency weigh increasingly on building briefs, and architects’ freedom of creation is limited. Nonetheless, they renew the architecture of power by shaping a new, oversized, evocative and resolutely modern monumentality. The turning point of decentralization appears as a result, rather than a break in the spatial replay of the places of power that took place during the thirty post-war years of prosperity. From spaces of domination, places of power have become spaces of membership, but without mitigating the identity tension emanating from the confrontation between the dialectical materialism of modernity and the evocative power of the genius loci, in short, between culture and the norm.
ISSN:1630-7305