Cité de Refuge is one of many International Style buildings that have fallen into disrepair. But a faithful recreation isn't the way forward.

"A new era of preservation is emerging where contemporary architects don't just restore the original vision of the architect, but act more like collaborators working toward the same conceptual goal—just separated by a few decades."

 
Cité de Refuge as constructed
Cité de Refuge as constructed © FLC-ADAGP

According to France's Chief Architect of Historical Monuments, François Chatillon, we're standing at a crossroads for architecture. We could go about restoring these modern buildings like we do historical ones—with an obsessive eye for detail that recreates the exact way they once existed. But doesn't that do them, and their creators, a disservice? After all, these buildings were supposed to represent a new age for rationality and utility in design. What good does conserving them as they were first built really do, except put the last nail in the coffin of modernism?

Chatillon thinks there's another way to conserve modern buildings. "To put it in a nutshell, I would dare to say that to conserve is modern, and it perhaps constitutes one of the roads to future modernity," he writes in his passionate manifesto, Conservation is Modern, recently published in Domus .

So what does that look like, exactly? Look no further than Le Corbusier's Cité de Refuge—a building Chatillon and fellow architect François Gruson restored during a five-year-long, $35.6 million renovation that wrapped up this spring.