Patrimoine de la santé : vers une méthode de reconversion pour des sites historiques d’envergure urbaine

More than a mere building, a hospital is often a neighbourhood of a city where the major moments in life are to found in condensed form: being born, being looked after, working, sleeping, thinking, giving life, losing it... Almost everybody comes to spend time in a hospital, a institution which acquires a special place in the collective memory. The conversion of these places to new uses, necessary of we want to keep them, is a subject to be addressed, then, with tact. The continual evolution of hospital techniques and norms result in an evolution of architectural forms. The sites can therefore undergo change in situ, renewing themselves without moving and sometimes liberating spaces for new urban activities. More often than not, however, hospitals tend to leave the historic centre of the town where they are short of room, to move out to the periphery and to hospital ‘cities’ which are more efficient and better connected to the major transport axes. The original hospital buildings often have remarkable architecture and are often protected as historic monuments. How can they be reintegrated into urban life, when they were originally conceived autonomous spaces? How can they accommodate new uses without losing their ‘spirit’? Without pretending to offer easy solutions which can be applied anywhere, this article sets out to offer a summary of present-day tendencies and some methodological elements in order to succeed in these conversion projects