When we no longer know how to see the value of what we have received

This autumn, the villa Les Tournesols will disappear from the seafront of De Panne.

It had been designed between 1902 and 1904 by my forebear Albert Dumont and his son Alexis, my great-grandfather. It will soon be replaced by nine floors of apartments.

Showing someone a photo of it recently, I heard this very spontaneous reaction:

“It’s ugly anyway, who cares.”

And what I thought was rather:

“Oh… now that’s an interesting comment.”

Because deep down, it contains almost the whole question that interests me.

What is “ugly” today?

What was imagined and built more than a century ago?

Or what a century of transformations, additions, removals and sometimes neglect has gradually left behind?

We transform something.

Little by little we stop taking care of it.

We forget what gave it its singularity.

Then one day, we look at what is left and conclude:

“It has no value anymore. Who cares.”

And its disappearance becomes almost self-evident.

Read the VRT article about the planned demolition of Villa Les Tournesols

But what value are we talking about?

A few streets away, the Dumont quarter, imagined in the same era, met another fate. Today it is listed.

People live there. They maintain the houses. They walk under the trees. They restore. They also transform, of course.

But something keeps circulating.

Sometimes a single street separates two destinies.

And this story of Les Tournesols interests me because it raises a question that goes far beyond architecture.

At some point, the question inevitably becomes economic.

What is this building still worth?

How much would its restoration cost?

What is the value of the land?

What can be built in its place?

Nine floors of apartments have a perfectly calculable value.

But how do we bring into that calculation what disappears with the villa?

An architectural intention?

A memory?

A way of inhabiting a place?

A family and collective history?

A trace of those who came before us?

We are extraordinarily good at measuring the material value of things.

But what has no price sometimes ends up being considered as having no value.

And these are two very different things.

What we receive without knowing it

This question of what we receive and what we pass on has been with me for some time.

Because we may be doing with our family histories something quite similar to what we do with certain buildings.

We know how to assess what appears in an estate.

A house.

A portfolio.

A company.

Artworks.

Objects.

We know how to inventory them, sell them, share them, pass them on.

But what do we do with everything that travels along with them and that no expert can value?

The stories.

The silences.

The unspoken.

The wounds.

The relationships to money, to power, to success.

But also — and this is essential for me — the strengths.

The talents.

The know-how.

The creative impulses.

The values.

The intuitions.

The singular ways of looking at the world.

All of this can keep travelling from generation to generation without appearing in any notarial deed.

And sometimes without our even knowing that we have received it.

The invisible does not carry only our wounds

Today we speak a great deal about transgenerational transmission from the angle of what asks to be repaired.

That matters.

But I find it a pity to look at the invisible only through our wounds.

Because we can also unconsciously reproduce what carries us.

Create without knowing that others created before us.

Undertake.

Take care.

Resist.

Imagine.

Pass on a particular relationship to beauty, to money, to work, to freedom or to the world.

And never have made the connection.

So perhaps making our inheritance visible does not only serve to understand the past.

It can change our trajectory.

Because from the moment I see more of what I have received, something becomes possible:

I can choose what I do with it.

What I wish to preserve.

What I want to transform.

What I can let disappear.

And what I can consciously lean on to build what comes next.

The Invisible Pact

This is the territory I have begun to call Le Pacte Invisible — The Invisible Pact.

What circulates between generations without necessarily being said, written — or even known.

What sometimes acts on our choices while we are unaware of its existence.

And what can also become a resource once we begin to look at it.

This is perhaps also where I see a link between individual and collective transformation.

Societies do not change only through laws, institutions or great systems.

They also change when individuals begin to look differently at their own history, and then put something else back into circulation around them.

In their families.

In their companies.

In their relationships.

In what they create.

Letting the invisible speak can then very concretely change what we pass on in the visible.

And that is probably what moves me in the story of Les Tournesols.

Not the idea that everything coming to us from the past should be preserved forever.

Certainly not.

But in order to choose what we want to keep, transform or let go, we first need to have been able to recognise its value.

Making visible does not oblige us to keep. Making visible gives back the choice.

Otherwise, we simply risk looking one day at what is left and saying:

“It’s ugly anyway, who cares.”

And moving on to something else.

So I remain with these two questions:

What do we really pass on when we believe we are passing on a heritage?

And perhaps above all:

What keeps being transmitted when no one knows any longer that it exists?