Mont-Saint-Aignan Campus is now under immediate and serious threat of demolition since its classification process by the municipality of Mont-Saint-Aignan had not been successfully retained, ultimately discharging the case leaving it in an extreme risk situation.
At the end of January 2020, a demolition permit was issued by the Prefecture of Seine-Maritime for the Building of Sciences of the University of Rouen. In this iconic example of tabula rasa, the library of Letters and Human Sciences is also threatened in the long term because of the lack of rehabilitation and modernisation works that could help it to be saved. Instead, a study project in progress for a new construction has been issued, ignoring any other alternative but its demolition. These buildings invite us to rediscover an urban, architectural and landscape coherence as a whole which has provided a higher education for the baby boom generation. The cultural, heritage and memorial value is today denied by this demolition permit, despite the emblematic charecter of this architecture.
At a time of collective unconscious disregard and ecological crisis when universities are inclined to disappear because of their obsolescence, it is undeniably impossible to opt for a meaningless high cost of energy-consuming destruction, with a disastrous carbon footprint.
Docomomo International, Docomomo France and the association Sites & Monuments (SPPEF) invite you to sign urgently the petition that could prevent the destruction of these remarkable buildings of Modern Architecture of the 1950s.
To sign the petition, please click here [French].