These are familiar architectural elements, almost reassuring, which again dress the facades of the houses. In the city centers as in the suburbs, a discreet, but very real trend, transforms the urban landscape.
By wandering through certain recent streets of Bordeaux, Rennes or Strasbourg, you may have had an impression of deja vu? Although it is a new district, the atmosphere evokes memories: a simple relief, a material, a rhythm in the windows. Like a return to the past that we had not really seen coming. In short, the new constructions no longer cry out their modernity, they have the past.
This turn is not the result of chance. In recent years, voices have risen against the uniformity of contemporary buildings. Too smooth, too glass, gray … In reaction, a current is gradually essential: neo-traditional architecture. It takes up the codes of yesteryear without falling into the copy. Roofs with two slopes, cornices, vertical rhythms, local materials, specific to each region: everything is thought to reconnect with a familiar silhouette. This style reassures, structures and re -registers buildings in a collective story.
And it’s not just a matter of lines. What strikes today is the reappearance of small details that we thought definitively relegated to the past. The colorful shutters return to dress the windows, often in painted wood, sometimes in textured aluminum. The red or ocher bricks are proudly displayed, raw or glazed, like a wink to the workers’ houses of yesteryear.
What about half -timbering? They also come back, but lightened, reinterpreted, thinner and graphic. It is a way of paying tribute without freezing, of anchoring the past in the present, for a long time. This return of ornaments, long deemed superfluous, is not trivial. He says something about our need for landmarks, our desire for accessible beauty, our taste found for details, which are not really there.
In a digital, unstable, moving world, the charm of a facade with lavender blue shutters or white half -timbered on a sand background has something deeply reassuring. A touch of sweetness in concrete, for new facades that tell a story.
