The Textilisation of Rubble as an Embodied Reflection on the Site-Specific Architectural Memory of Les Petites Affiches

Abstract

Les Petites Affiches refers to a rehabilitation project by the architectural agency SCAU used as a key site of experimentation for a practice-based and design-led PhD project fully integrated into the daily life of the agency. Based on a textile design approach, this paper explores the idea of textilisation as means of developing new modes of transmission based on the in situ transformation of rubble as an alternative to “tabula rasa” or identical restoration. First reviewing different approaches dealing with architectural heritage in the light of the Anthropocene context, the paper then discusses different meanings of the concept of textilisation before clarifying how rubble from Les Petites Affiches is conceptually and materially integrated in a new architectural project in the form of pigments, fabrics or floor surfaces. In this context, the trans-materialized memory of the past building becomes one of the main components of the future edifice. In this case, 111.39 kg of rubble from, the Parisian building subject to rehabilitation (2017–2018). The experiment—developed during an on-site-residency—focus on how such rubble could be appropriated through textile processes to give life to new architectural surfaces. For example, some fragments were ground and sieved to achieve the fine grain of a pigment before being mixed with a binder. The ink obtained, filled with the site’s history, was printed on textile using silk-screen methods. Bringing together two materials: textile and stone as a means of revealing the different strata of the site, the outcomes of this process offers the occasion to discuss the potential of conceiving and materialising an architecture informed by its past as well as various approaches to textilisation.