Baukultur questions

Resumen

Françoise Choay, in her anthology Le Patrimoine en questions. Anthologie pour un combat calls for a return to the values of our cultural heritage, which are increasingly being lost in the course of globalization and commercialization. Choay ultimately argues for a heritage-led shaping of the environment. She brings together in her anthology, published in 2009, a number of the undisputed founding texts of heritage conservation. Her selection, however, remains oddly backward-looking and lacks more recent, groundbreaking texts. We expand the discourse with a call for a movement for comprehensive high-quality Baukultur. This lifts the conflicting antagonism between heritage conservation and contemporary creation and understands the treatment of the whole built environment as a single entity. If the latter is committed to holistic high quality and places the functional, social and cultural needs of people at the center, it also strengthens the preservation and maintenance of cultural heritage as a central reference of any development strategy. Such a new narrative seems to us today as important as necessary to overcome the current, obvious quality deficits of our built environment.