The year I entered architecture school—2002—a house was classified as a Monument Historique, part of the national heritage of France.
This alone was not extraordinary; what was extraordinary was its age. The building was not medieval, baroque, or even modernist.
It was contemporary: constructed between 1994 and 1998 by OMA and Rem Koolhaas, engineered by Cecil Balmond, with interiors by Maarten Van Severen.

For a young architecture student, this almost instantaneous canonization was electrifying. It demonstrated that contemporary architecture could possess cultural value equal to that of cathedrals or palaces.
Architecture, for once, was not merely a service—it was a form of knowledge, a cultural artifact worthy of protection.

Yet that recognition also provoked confusion.

First, because that house detonated every expectation I held about what domestic architecture should be.
And second, because my inherited understanding of heritage—shaped by Luxembourg’s pragmatic culture—was of a different order entirely.

I grew up in Rumelange: the smallest town in Luxembourg in the 1980s and 1990s, where the micro-urban metabolism was in visible transformation.
There, the notion of built heritage was fluid.

A photograph from the 1970s captures the town in a state of improbable coexistence:
a public square with a bandstand,
a working farm at the center,
and an industrial hall embedded in the same urban fabric.
Three forms, three typologies, three coexisting definitions of the “center.”

By the 1980s, the KIHN company—once anchored in the heart of Rumelange—had relocated its production to connect with the rail network, leaving behind two fabrication halls and three assembly halls designed by Willi Leurs.
They were repurposed, pragmatically, as a covered public parking area, but also—less officially—as:
a covered public space, an interior landscape, a playground, a sports hall, a shelter for imagination.

They offered space for countless adventures.
And then, inevitably, they were demolished—replaced by an open-air parking lot and ten ornamental trees.
(And later, the extension of the day-care center.)

Rumelange also had a bandstand on its municipal square.
I never knew it personally, but I am intimately connected to it: it was designed and built by my great-grandfather as part of his master craftsman certification.
It too was demolished—by his four sons—to make room for six parking spaces.

It is a minor story, perhaps, but one that haunts me.
If the word patrimoine—heritage—derives from patrimonium, literally what a father leaves to his family, then the act of erasing that inheritance becomes an act of high symbolic significance.
It is both social and cultural—an act of patricide.

And if this anecdote is not unique, but representative of what happens daily in our country—then perhaps it is not simply a habit, but a pathology.
A collective one.

In the Land of Mary—Marienland—are we all condemned to suffer from an Oedipus complex?
Bound by a Judeo-Christian education that represses the desire for intimacy with the Mother, do we unconsciously eliminate the Father—or, symbolically, heritage?

Thus emerges the hypothesis of an anthropological, or rather a socio-cultural pathology: OEDIPUS LUXEMBURGENSIS.

A diagnosis of a national condition that, today—this morning—might serve as a kind of collective pardon.
A tongue-in-cheek exoneration, perhaps, but also a useful one.

It allows us to establish a vantage point—from which to frame and construct what we call an international or environmental perspective on heritage.
A perspective that must inevitably begin from the local—because in psychology, everything begins with trauma.
And in the field of heritage, Luxembourg offers an extensive catalogue of patrimonial traumas.

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One of the most regrettable disappearances remains the Thermal Power Plant on the Terre Rouge slag heap—an industrial cathedral whose authenticity, scale, and spatial capacity would have justified preservation on any list of rational grounds.
Its strategic position, too, argued for continuity.

Roughly 300 kilometres away, a site of striking similarity—the Zollverein complex in Essen—was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2001.
There, recognition did not result in architectural taxidermy.
It became the catalyst for a strategic redevelopment, a productive edge orbiting a preserved and reactivated core, where economy and culture, past and future, coexist without nostalgia.

Buildings like the Kohlenwäsche were rehabilitated precisely because of their spatial capacities.
They now house exhibitions, congresses, events—programs that exploit the scale they inherited rather than deny it.

At Essen, heritage was a platform.
At Rumelange, it became a void.
In Luxembourg, the official narrative invoked asbestos and budgetary explosion to justify demolition—arguments that are, technically, mythical.
The costs of asbestos removal are identical whether one demolishes or rehabilitates.
The difference lies not in budget, but in imagination.

And so, in the end, the investment produced nothing—a cleared site, a tabula rasa.
A monument to the absence of monuments.

UNESCO defines heritage as “an outstanding example of a type of construction, architectural or technological ensemble, or landscape illustrating significant stages in human history.”
By that measure, our national approach privileges not the architecture but the ground it occupies.

We consecrate soil by vacating it.
We measure progress in parking spaces: six here, ten there.
Our logic is extractive—of ore, of surface, of use.

Luxembourg produces nine million tons of inert waste each year.
A number without texture—until translated: that equals 400 000 truckloads, or 1 600 trucks per day transporting ruins.
If each truck travels 40 kilometres, the resulting emissions total 12 000 tons of CO₂—the carbon equivalent of 6 000 round-trip flights from Luxembourg to New York, or the annual footprint of 790 Luxembourgers.

Yet transport accounts for barely 1 percent of a building’s life-cycle energy.
The remaining 99 percent divides between operational energy—heating, cooling, electricity—and embodied energy, the latent energy of materials.
As operational energy declines through efficiency and renewables, embodied energy now represents half of a building’s total impact.
In demolition, that balance doubles back upon itself: for concrete, the energy required to destroy often doubles or triples the energy once needed to build.

To demolish, therefore, is not neutrality—it is an act of energetic violence.

Returning to Rumelange: an old watercolor by Foni Tissen depicts a narrow street lined with houses built from local stone, lime plaster, sandstone jambs, timber from nearby forests, and slate from Martelange—eighty kilometres away.
Every material was locally sourced, forming a coherent vernacular ecosystem.
Today, that narrative collapses. Martelange slate is gone. We renovate with imported Spanish slate—twenty times the carbon footprint of the original.

Why this obsession with carbon? Because even the most conservative institutions now treat it as destiny.
Every four years, the U.S. National Intelligence Council briefs the incoming president with its Global Trends report.
The 2021 edition—A More Contested World—draws on NASA data to chart 150 years of measurable climate change: rising surface temperatures mirrored by rising CO₂ concentrations.
The correlation is beyond debate.

Luxembourg’s own emissions divide into ten categories: seventh—heating and electricity, fourth—construction, third—buildings, and first—transport.
All of them, in some way, are urbanistic problems—architectural by nature.

Combined, they yield a portrait: 16 tons of CO₂ per capita per year.
To limit warming to 1.5 degrees, that figure must fall to 1.6 tons by 2050—a reduction by a factor of ten.

Such data invite tunnel vision. We risk reducing sustainability to carbon arithmetic and forgetting the holistic dimensions of durability:
Environmental, Social, Economic, Technical, Cultural.

By this broader definition, the 145 000 cubic metres of the demolished Thermal Plant were the opposite of sustainable.
They embodied energy, history, scale, and yet were treated as waste.

For perspective: a nearly identical volume—135 000 cubic metres—was transformed between 1994 and 2000 into what is now the Tate Modern in London.
A turbine hall became a public concourse, an engine of urban regeneration.

The Thermal Plant, by contrast, became an absence.
A lost opportunity—not only of space and scale, but of strategic position, a potential hinge of the cross-border metropolis.

If this represents the loss of industrial heritage, the same pattern extends to the agricultural.

Often, we commemorate demolition with documentation—or worse, with an anodyne plaque praising the grandeur of what no longer exists.
Sometimes the plaque celebrates not the lost building, but the heroic act of erasure.

The Agrocenter at Mersch followed this script.
Five hundred thousand cubic metres of concrete erased; in the background of the developer’s video, one can almost calculate the impact:
1 to 1.7 billion megajoules of embodied energy, up to 200 000 tons of CO₂, the equivalent of 12 700 Luxembourgers.
All that to replace a site once specific and emblematic with its antithesis: the most generic environment possible.

At this rate, our towns will soon require signage simply to remind us where we are—Mersch? Mondorf?
The mediocre will triumph: R + 3, white plaster, consensus absolute.

We are demolishing our local distinctions to construct a universal simulation—a simulacrum of built culture.
The suburban banality we export is also the banality we import.

But alternatives exist.

The same type of silo that disappeared in Mersch still stands in Copenhagen, where COBE Architects preserved and transformed it into an urban hybrid: a public plinth, a public roof, and housing between.
Through pragmatic prefabrication—balconies and windows clipped onto the retained concrete structure—they produced an emblematic housing project of undeniable spatial quality, crowned by a public rooftop restaurant.

Even more modest conversions become national statements.
In Oslo, HRTB Arkitekter transformed a 1953 grain silo into 226 student dwellings.
Each unit re-inhabits the scale of the silo, translating industrial voids into domestic ergonomies—a model of environmental, economic, cultural, and above all social sustainability.

In Luxembourg, by comparison, the 2019 waiting list for student housing counted 350 names.
By 2021, 650. The mismatch is architectural before it is statistical.

Other examples show that transformation need not depend on spectacle but on precision.
At Mingsheng Wharf in Shanghai, Atelier Deshaus transformed a former silo complex into an art museum.
They activated the plinth and the roof—two neglected strata of industrial architecture—turning them into public terraces, urban stages, thresholds between the city and the river.
Spatial pragmatism became scenography.

A similar intelligence governs the Erlenmatt district in Basel, where an unassuming silo was preserved as part of a new neighbourhood.
Instead of demolition, it was reinhabited: a hybrid of administration, hostel, restaurant, and start-up incubator.
New tools were invented in the process—a circular saw designed to cut concrete membranes—proof that adaptation itself can be an act of invention.

Cultural, social, and economic durability align here not as ideology but as practice.
The restaurant animates the plinth, circulation threads through the silos, the rooms occupy the cores.
A modest building becomes a machine for coexistence.

Even the tertiary sector is not immune to the Oedipal urge.
At Differdange, a collective of architects and artists—including Bert Theis—once sought to re-animate the Hadir Tower, giving it voice and dignity through public interventions.
The attempt was both humorous and serious—a civic therapy session conducted through art.
In 2015 the tower was demolished. Differdange gained a shopping mall, but still no railway station.

The same pattern repeats.
The CNS headquarters, an idiosyncratic modernist composition, was demolished this year: 20 000 m² of floor area, 75 000 m³ of volume, 44 000 tons of CO₂—the equivalent of 22 000 flights between Luxembourg and New York.

In Brussels, by contrast, the former World Trade Center faced a similar fate but found another trajectory.
Architects and developers decided to retain elevator cores, stairwells, foundations.
They experimented with micro-circularity in situ: reusing structural elements and materials on site to reduce carbon and energy impact.
The result is a structurally adaptable framework, capable of hosting programs from housing to hotel to office, built around a greenhouse-like public foyer.

The Oedipus complex extends to infrastructure.
At Esch, the Ronnebreck Bridge once seemed to lead nowhere—yet in fact linked Terre Rouge and Metzeschmelz, an accidental urban hinge.
Instead of demolition, could it not have become a Ponte Vecchio of Esch—inhabited, traversed, animated?
A marker of metropolitan identity rather than an administrative inconvenience?
Or, alternatively, a local High Line, a landscaped connector between neighbourhoods, an extension of the Galgenberg combining infrastructure and landscape?

The landscape question is far from anecdotal.
It concerns another kind of heritage—one equally threatened with extinction.
As early as 1338, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government illustrated the intimate reciprocity between the built city and its unbuilt environment.
The wellbeing of one depended on the health of the other.

Today, this reciprocity re-emerges under a bureaucratic acronym: ZAN – Zéro Artificialisation Nette.
Proposed by the European Commission in 2011, it defines the goal of “no net land artificialisation by 2050”: the preservation of soil, biodiversity, and quality of life.
Urban expansion is reframed as ecological debt.

The Commission’s decarbonisation trajectories assume not only emission reduction but the amplification of negative emissions—the capacity of ecosystems and landscapes to sequester carbon.
Different landscapes absorb different quantities of CO₂, in vegetation and in soil.
To lose them is to forfeit a vital technology of the biosphere.

In the last fifty years, Luxembourg has lost roughly nine percent of its landscapes to buildings and infrastructure—217 square kilometres gone, and with them an estimated 200 000 tons of stored carbon.
Each new surface poured is also a reservoir emptied.

A century ago, in the first issue of L’Esprit Nouveau, Le Corbusier reminded readers that architecture “has destinies more serious than those of the decorative arts.”
He invoked the sublime—beyond beauty or ugliness—and illustrated it with a series of American silos and factories:
“Magnificent heralds of a new time; the American engineers crush the dying architecture beneath their calculations.”

One wonders: a hundred years and countless demolitions later, will we still recognize the sublimity of the inherited structures around us?
Will we know how to activate them, to use them critically and progressively in confronting the urgencies of our time?

Can we, in Esch or Rumelange or Ettelbruck, acknowledge that we have inherited enterprises and scales that are themselves sublime—industrial, infrastructural, terrifying—and that we possess both the means and the responsibility to integrate them into our lived landscapes?

The question is whether we can outgrow our Oedipus complex—whether we can accept heritage not as trauma but as potential, as the substrate for a holistic sustainability that is environmental, social, economic, technical, and cultural.

The choice remains stark: to continue demolishing and rebuilding the most banal suburbanity imaginable, or to dare to activate the ugly, vast, frightening, but sublime inheritance that already exists.

Through collective vision and new scales of ambition, we might yet regain access—to landscapes both built and natural—of the most sublime kind.

Lecture in the context of 'Symposium architecture et patrimoine' organisé par la ville de Esch-sur-Alzette.