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The notion of physiological comfort – meaning responses to temperature and humidity but also to lighting and acoustics – has been a driving force in architectural production throughout the twentieth century. Whether concealed, embedded, exposed, or ‘featured’, building environment services have played a dominant role in architectural design. This book puts the spotlight on those paradoxically ‘bulky’ yet ‘invisible’ networks that accommodate our physiological needs. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, the authors look back over both the cultural and the material issues that have shaped modern and contemporary architecture's pursuit of comfort by design. In addition, a number of recent, iconic restoration and renovation projects are presented here by the designers themselves. Seeking to strike the right balance between conserving modern built heritage and responding to today's energy-saving paradigms, they demonstrate how the concept of material well-being, in the sense of today's ‘sustainable comfort’, remains high on the agenda. And always at the heart of these reflections are the building services installations themselves.

Raymond Lopez and Michel Holley's superlative scheme for the Caisse Centrale d’Allocations Familiales de la Région Parisienne (CCAFRP, shortened to CAF) was the talk of the town on its inauguration in 1959 . A “pioneering edifice”, hailed as “the first fully suspended curtain wall”, “unique in its plastic modelling”, and a testing ground in its own right, the ensemble has been fêted in our own time as a salient example of architectural production in the post-WWII era, not least on account of the constructional ingenuity applied to it and the assertive, not to say militant, urge to innovation that inspired it. (Fig. 1) But aside from the undeniable value it possesses in architectural and technical terms, the CAF, in Rue Viala, has another, still more recent claim to fame: its addition to the Inventaire supplémentaire des Monuments historiques (ISMH) in 1998 was annulled by a ruling of the Conseil d’État in 2002, after a long (and violent) legal controversy which pitted the heritage authorities – offshoots of the Ministry of Culture – against the Ministry of Social Affaires, the entity with custodianship of the CAF . Deprived of any protective measure under the Monuments Historiques, and long under threat of demolition, the CAF finally underwent a rénovation lourde – a programme of real estate development that, by the time it was completed in 2010, left part of it demolished, radically altered its physical character, and caused an irreversible loss of original material fabric.

Consacré à la sauvegarde des grandes œuvres de l’ingénierie du XXe siècle, ce premier numéro des Cahiers du TSAM explore le devenir de certaines des plus remarquables et emblématiques structures en béton du siècle passé. A travers les figures d’héroïques constructeurs, il interroge l’héritage construit des ingénieurs, convoquant les plus audacieux d’entre eux (Freyssinet, Isler, Maillart, Nervi, Vierendeel, etc.). Alors que la sauvegarde de l’architecture du XXe siècle s’est récemment constituée en discipline à part entière, la préservation des ouvrages de l’ingénierie de cette période est encore balbutiante. Considérés trop souvent sous le seul point de vue de la sécurité ou de la maintenance, ces ouvrages s’avèrent parfois de véritables chefs-d’œuvre, jalons d’un « art de l’ingénieur » à la frontière entre performance technique et beauté plastique. Ces cahiers sont donc l’occasion d’initier, à l’appui d’exemples et de projets de sauvegarde concrets, une sensibilisation aux enjeux patrimoniaux dans le domaine de l’ingénierie.