L’invention d’un monument : le manoir normand selon Gabriel Ruprich-Robert

The invention of a monument : the Normandy manor according to Gabriel Ruprich-Robert. In 1888, at the Paris Salon, Gabriel Ruprich-Robert exhibited the architectural renderings of four timber-framed rural houses, situated in the Pays d’Auge in Normandy. These drawings have all the precision characteristic of the works executed for the French Historic Monuments Commission, to which the architect belonged. Up to this date, rural houses had usually been observed only in terms of their picturesqueness. Here, however, they are placed at the beginning of a process of monumentalisation which witnessed two stages. First of all the drawings of the four rural dwellings were adopted by Julien Guadet to serve as models in his teaching and in his treatise on the elements and the theory of architecture (Eléments et théorie de l’architecture, c. 1895) and then for the collection of drawings published by Jean de Bonnefon and Georges Wybo in 1913 : Les maisons des champs au pays de France. The traumatism of the destruction wrought by the First World War on rural architecture completed this process of monumentalisation. Two of the models, henceforth described as « manors » were scheduled as historic monuments in 1921-1922, whilst the two others were given statutory protection on the supplementary list of Historic Monuments in 1927. One of these buildings, the Pipardière Farm, was dismantled and stored for a long time before being reconstructed in another part of France. Its layout and structure were profoundly modified by this reconstruction. The authorisation to move the building dates from 1991-1992, and raises the problem of how the rural heritage is to be recognised in (or outside) its territorial specificity.Rouffignac Aude de. L’invention d’un monument : le manoir normand selon Gabriel Ruprich-Robert. In: Histoire de l'art, N°27, 1994. Monuments. pp. 51-61