The New New? Curated Second Hand as a (Re)Construction Principle for Notre-Dame de Paris
Mini Review In view of ever-increasing environmental and climate problems, a sustainable approach to dealing with the world’s resources is indeed being discussed, but the focus is placed primarily on the conservation of physical resources and much less on the reuse of intangible, non-reproducible cultural resources. In architecture, however, recycling cannot be reduced to atoms because both material and immaterial values are embodied within residual building mass [1]. When designing, reuse entails working and building with the past and its meaning for today. The more we understand the existing, “the less we must stand in opposition to it,” says Hermann Czech, “and the easier it will be to understand our decisions as a continuation of a whole” [2]. As a clever recycling of semiotics and both history and narratives, spoliation and assemblage are, according to our thesis, capable of expanding the principle of reuse and repurposing from the level of materiality to immaterial values, ...