The Past Never Ceases to be Reshaped

Léa-Catherine Szacka is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG). Since 2024 she is the Vice-President of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN). Szacka has been visiting professor in various institutions including Harvard GSD studio abroad program, the ETH Zurich, The Berlage and EPFL-ENAC. She is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (2016), for which she received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for outstanding contribution to the study or knowledge of architectural history in 2017, and Biennials/Triennials: Conversations on the Geography of Itinerant Display (2019). In recent years, she also the co-author of The Concert: Pink Floyd in Venice (2017); Paolo Portoghesi: Architecture Between History, Politics and Media (2023); and It’s About Time: The Architecture of Climate Change (2024) as well as co-editor of Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture (2018) and Concrete Oslo (2018). In 2022, she was co-curator of the 10th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. Her last exhibition project, Crossed History: Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable, Phyllis Lambert on Architecture and the City is currently on display at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris.

On 12 February 2025 at 6.30 pm at the Kulturzentrum in Luxembourg City took place the official launch of HouseEurope!, a European citizens' initiative that aims to make the renovation of buildings a new norm. If today the social and environmental motivations behind HouseEurope! seem evident, saving buildings from demolition has not always been the norm. How can we replace this event in the longer history of architecture?
This short lecture/class will narrate the entangled history of the Gare d’Orsay, a monumental train station and hotel built in 1900 on the left bank of the river Seine, just in time for Paris’ Exposition Universelle. Originally erected on the ruins of the Palais d’Orsay by Beaux-Arts architect Victor Laloux, the Gare d’Orsay symbolised both tradition and modernity: it satisfied the requirements of a modern station (using a structural system consisting of cast iron pillars and incorporating mechanical baggage handling ramps and elevators for passengers) but responded equally to the neighboring architectural setting which imposed a classical and decorative appearance. Yet only 58 years after its inauguration, the building ceased to operate as a train station. Meant to be demolished and replaced by a glass and steel hotel, the monument was saved in-extremis in 1973 by French Minister for Cultural Affairs Jacques Duhamel and transformed into a colossal museum hosting art collection spanning from 1848 to 1914.
Unraveling the story of Gare d’Orsay – a story that starts around 1751 and continues until today – this lecture will focus on the notion of heritage. It will show how questions of authorship, tradition, modernity, activism and the value of history evolved over time and are still contested territories.