Architectural documents: essential archives for the study of lycees

Many architects, some of which well known, have taken part from the end of the 19th century in the design of "lycees" (France's high schools) until the middle of the 20th century. As specialists in the study and implementation of this kind of architectural programme, several architects became "theorists" of school architecture. Later on, some of them became architectural consultants for the ministere de l'Education nationale (France's Ministry of National Education) and held discussions with the Ministry teams with a view to defining design and construction standards of school buildings. It is therefore a kind of hegemony of a small number of professionals selected or co-opted that the advent of the public architectural competitions procedure challenged in the early 1980's. The decentralisation, at a later stage, played a part in completing the destruction of what was then a private preserve, by opening the door of public commissions to a larger number of architects. Regardless of the period concerned, to go behind the scene of the creation of lycees as architectural objects, it is important not to overlook architectural archives. One can then savour the significance and importance of a large corpus in which the studied building(s) is (are) included, whether it be the complete production of one or several architects, or the specific corpus of lycees' buildings planned or designed by them. This quest for corpus can thus bring out projects that have never seen the light, in particular due to failure in an architectural competition. In this instance, the architectural archives provide mainly information on the phase preceding the construction work, on the approach of such professional towards a familiar programme or, on the contrary, a new one, in the case where he was taking part for the first time in a competition, in other words, on the pathways taken that would lead to the final project by following all the steps of the design process.