RICCARDO GIORDANO is the Chief Architect in charge of the VÉTHEUIL church. But what does this mean, and how does it work in practice?
An Architecte en Chef des Monuments Historiques (ACMH) is first and foremost a Heritage Architect in France. Chief Architects are recruited by competitive examination every 7 or 8 years, the age pyramid (driven by retirements) determining the number of positions available. There are currently 30 Chief Architects. They are appointed after the competition by the Ministry of Culture, which allocates regions to them through the Heritage and Architecture Department. Thus, RICCARDO GIORDANO has been assigned the following territorial responsibilities: Ain, Isère, Loire, Haute-Savoie, Savoie, Vosges, Mobilier National and Manufacture des Gobelins.
Another special feature of the ACMH function is that architects appointed in this way are free to continue working in their own right, as the Ministry of Culture alone cannot guarantee their annual workload.
These architects are responsible for managing maintenance, restoration and renovation projects on behalf of the owners of historic buildings, who remain the project owners. They apply the same rigorous methodology as in any major project: diagnosis (preliminary study), pre-project, etc...
It should be noted that when historic monuments are owned by local authorities (as is the case for the church in Vétheuil), these authorities are not obliged to work with ACMH, but can contact the Architectes du Patrimoine en France. On the other hand, work on all state-owned monuments can only be managed by ACMH.
So why an ACMH for the VÉTHEUIL church?
The Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC), acting on behalf of the Architecte des Bâtiments de France, has identified the need for maintenance work on the exterior of the building, and has requested a sanitary diagnosis of the building for "leaking roofs" (a problem long identified in the church of Vétheuil and largely linked to the construction of stone slab gutters).
Based on the DRAC's request for a study, the municipality of Vétheuil issued a call for tenders to several architects, and RICCARDO GIORDANO won the tender. He thus became the architect in charge of the project on behalf of the Town Hall, which is the project owner.
RICCARDI GIORDANO worked for 12 years with Pierre-André LABLAUDE, who retired in 2011. Pierre-André LABLAUDE was responsible for the Val d'Oise department (among others), and was particularly involved with the church of VÉTHEUIL, on which his own father - also a chief architect of historic monuments - had written his final thesis.
The project proposed by ACMH concerns the renovation of the outer roofs (those of the chapels) and the sacristy roof, bearing in mind that the renovation of the upper roofs (choir and nave) had been carried out by Pierre-André LABLAUDE.
The tiles will be removed and "sounded" (to check that they are in good condition), and will then be reused in uncovered or uncovered areas, and supplemented with new tiles as required. There will be no glazed tiles and no "Burgundian-style" roofs, which were common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but were lost in the Classical period. The break will be "scrambled", as in ROYAUMONT or VILLIERS-LE-BEL.
This project will be put out to consultation shortly, and will give rise to major works requiring scaffolding on the north, south and west parts of the church for around a year. The work should resolve a number of long-standing problems with the building, which were already pointed out at the end of the 19th century by Chief Architect Alphonse DURAND.
They have been exacerbated by the lack of annual maintenance of the building, which should be the commune's primary concern and which is - alas - totally neglected.
Find out more about the Architectes en Chef des Monuments Historiques here
And for Heritage Architects, it's click here
