Railway Reuse : Renewal and continuity of a practice.
Pauline DETAVERNIER, ENSAPM, France
In its contemporary sense, reuse consists in the reutilization of an obsolete object. By preserving its integrity - which differentiates it from recycling - it allows its history to be maintained1. By saving the energy necessary to manufacture a new material2, reuse, apprehended through an architectural point of view, constitutes one of the answers to the ecological challenge that we face. It questions the implementation of technical, social and behavioral actions in the act of building.
The notion of "urban mining" characterizes a source of available materials that can be used for reuse. This way, the SNCF's building stock appears to be a particularly fertile playground: the station as an architectural object often designed in series according to a standard plan3, the territorial scale of the railway network, and the standardization of infrastructural artifacts make it an interesting source of reusable material.
This is the observation made by the REAP team which, since 2018, has been working within the architectural firm AREP to orchestrate the identification of these stocks of materials (ballast, shimming wood, ties, rails...), their storage, and their reuse in the firm's projects4.
To document this contemporary issue, this communication proposes to place the action carried out by REAP in a history of reuse within SNCF. Has the national railway network, conducive to the use of reusable materials, always been perceived as such? Like the façade of the Lilles-Flandres train station, built with the stones of its Parisian counterpart, what genealogy of reuse can be woven? Wouldn't the development of this "innovative" approach within SNCF be the renewal of traditional practices commonly used in the pre-industrial era? Finally, doesn't reuse, by adapting a standard material and inserting it into a new project or vice versa, produce a singular architectural value that distinguishes itself from standardized railway construction?
Mots clés : reuse|railway network|train station|circularity|history
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