What we have inherited

Imagine walking into a clothing store to buy a new jacket. The salesperson listens to you attentively but doesn’t take their eyes off the one you’re wearing. After hearing your explanations and knowing the sale is at stake, they tell you that you already have a great jacket. The fabric, they argue, is no longer made, and the seams are hand-stitched, with a drape and fit that you won’t find in a new one. They end up convincing you to leave it with them for a few days to sew on a missing button, clean it, and press it.

A similar situation to this fictitious one—which, let’s be honest, we’d like to see happen more often—actually occurred in Bordeaux in 1996. Two young, relatively unknown architects at the time, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, were commissioned to remodel Leon Aucoc Square, in the south of the city. They found a place that, in their own words, “was already beautiful in its authenticity, without sophistication.” “It had the beauty of what is evident, necessary, and just. We spent a few days visiting it and talking to the locals, and finally decided to replenish the gravel and prune the lime trees,” they detailed.

Over time, this anecdote achieved the status of a paradigm and has been retold in architecture schools. Lacaton and Vassal turned this way of looking at the built environment into a cornerstone of their practice. In 2019, they received the European Mies van der Rohe Award, along with Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin, for the equally celebrated rehabilitation of 530 residential units in buildings that the French government had planned to demolish, in the same city where the architects had spared the square.

When they were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2021, one of the highest honors in architecture, the Mies Pavilion in Barcelona dedicated an exhibition to them titled Never demolish, inviting consideration of the potential of the built environment in terms of heritage value and accumulated energy. We are not exactly in a position to waste energy.

It takes us years to realize what we have inherited. We inherit a home or a mortgage to pay off. We inherit a bank account but also debts to the tax office. Over time, we come to see our parents when we look in the mirror and realize that everything, good or bad, is an inheritance.

Giving things a second chance is not only an exercise in responsibility but also a display of practical intelligence.

We also inherit our cities. Municipal, regional, or state governments create lists of buildings and squares “protected by heritage,” and UNESCO, an international organization, designates some as “World Heritage Sites.” We tend to think that if something is protected, it must be good and worth preserving, and if it isn’t, it can be demolished without a second thought.

However, the lesson from Bordeaux shows us that we have inherited everything that exists. Everything is heritage. Seen in this light, perhaps there shouldn’t be heritage classifications.

Giving things a second chance is not only an exercise in responsibility but also a display of practical intelligence at a time when we’re full of talk about sustainability and energy efficiency. It’s not about paralyzing conservatism for its own sake but about using and leveraging what exists as a foundation to create something new that otherwise could never have existed. It’s less about reheating yesterday’s leftovers and more about inventing a new dish with them. Consider, in this context, the trencadís of modernism or the slag from smelting furnaces that coats the façades of the Colònia Güell Crypt.

In this sense, the project by the French architects is exemplary, as it goes beyond a mere structural repair to fix leaks—of which there must have been plenty, of course. Their strategy involved building enclosed terraces, grounded structures that reinforced the buildings, some of which were very unstable, while creating a gallery that also provides thermal insulation. Seen from the outside, no one would guess these are the same old blocks.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect, however, is the spatial renewal achieved. These galleries have given more space to blocks with very small units that proliferated between the 1950s and 1970s in many European cities. This is a legacy of our culture, difficult to manage due to the large number built in a short period, which came to house many families during the demographic boom of the 1970s. The courage lies in not looking the other way and confronting the problem we’ve inherited. The magic lies in doing so simply