Conference - Reconstruction of farm buildings in Calvados

Saturday, April 6, 2024 at 3pm
Auditorium of the Château de Caen -

On the occasion of the publication of "La reconstruction du bâti agricole dans le Calvados", published by the Société des antiquaires de Normandie, Patrice Gourbin will be giving a talk on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of France.

At the time of the Liberation, Calvados was France's worst-affected département in terms of agriculture, with almost 2,200 farms destroyed. Here, as throughout France, reconstruction was carried out by the state according to a modernist, functionalist doctrine.
In Calvados, the Coopérative de reconstruction de l'Habitat rural (CRHR) was the driving force behind this policy. The transformation carried out on this occasion turned the landscape of agricultural architecture upside down: separation of the home from the farm, outsourcing of product storage and processing. It took place against a backdrop of accelerating modernization of farming practices, at a time when some were seeking to maintain "peasant agriculture" between collectivization and industrialization.
A large number of buildings remain from the Reconstruction era.

More information HERE

visual: Farm in Bourguébus. Photo Patrice Gourbin