La question du réemploi dans la sauvegarde du patrimoine bâti

Abstract

Abstract: Theories on the heritage, its preservation, its restoration and the modalities of its protection, mainly questions related to the integrity and the authenticity, have been developed since centuries in particular in the fields of architecture and other plastic arts. Unlikely the re-use arrived only late as subject of these debates. Indeed, the current patrimonial consciousness has a mitigated look on the practice of the re-use. It condemns it without appeal, by misunderstanding, by forgetting that it’s immemorial, in the Mediterranean area and somewhere else. Nevertheless up today, the re-use continues to constitute, a basic form of preservation or, at least, a modality of transmission of material cultures which would had disappear otherwise. In Constantine, as in other Algerian cities, the human action never refrained from marking its imprint by using and by reusing the tracks of her predecessors. It is the image which offers Constantine’s old town, a palimpsest that reveals, between lines, the substrata of all the occupants since the pre-antique period. However, if we linger little over this phenomenon, it could reveal more important subtleties and why no, find there, a will of preservation of the reused object. The re-use which consists in using an object having lost its use to give it another one, with a minimum of modification on its structure and shape, is studied in the present research, under the prism of the precepts of the protection and the patrimonial transmission. The historical retrospective underlines the emergence of three main types of re-use: functional, esthetical and symbolic. This distinction can be observers from the beginning of the practice, in its strictest meaning, whether in the western or in the Muslim world. In the first world, the re-use seems to be for esthetical and symbolic dominance, and is developed in a factural way. Whether in the most ancient time where Rome reused the elements of the Greek architecture by admiration, or in later periods, the re-use takes a rather artistic aspect. Whereas in the Islamic world, the re-use seems to be a more current and more usual practice, making part of the constructive act itself. This distinction raises the cognitive value of the elements of re-use, which witnesses of not only a disappeared monument, but also, enriches the knowledge of the ancestral constructive methods. So, the historic cities did not develop strata on stratum, but stratum in stratum. Thus the re-use would be at the origin of the character of palimpsest so often observed in sites inhabited for a long as the example of the city of Constantine, the study case of our research. The re-use is studied through a sampling of 4 major monuments of Constantine’s old town, itself resulting from the study of the archaeological permanencies, which means: Constantine’s big mosque (Djamaa el Kebir), Ahmed Bey’s palace, the military base of the Kasbah, the bridge of El Kanara. So, through a study confronting the textual, graphic and iconographic sources with the observation in situ; which are the principal rules of the monographic study, this research analyzes the historical re-use in Constantine’s old town. So, this study capitalizes the information, and aims besides, the clearing of a still unexplored ground, to produce a renewed knowledge of the studied monuments as well as their architectonic elements, and thereby, to enrich the level of the knowledge of the studied monuments as well as their architectonic elements, and thereby, to enrich the level of the knowledge of the ancestral constructive methods.