• A building was evacuated after the collapse of a ceiling beam on Wednesday December 7 in Rennes. 

  • The old center of the Breton capital has been under close surveillance since a report established the state of degradation of many buildings. 

  • By carrying out work that is not always suitable, the owners of these small dwellings have weakened the wooden structure of these buildings. 

It is a coincidence of the news which the city would have done well.

Wednesday morning, the ceiling of a small building in the old center of Rennes collapsed.

The two students who occupied this accommodation were fortunately not injured.

But the news of this sudden collapse is a stain in a city which boasted of its ambitious renovation program as recently as Monday in a city council meeting.

Rennes' elected officials even voted in favor of the third part of the plan to safeguard the historic center enacting the renovation of 100 buildings by 2030. Asked about the risk of collapse in Rennes like those experienced in Lille or Marseille, the elected in charge of the case had been cautious.

“We are never safe from a failure of a building.

But I have the feeling that we did everything to avoid it, ”

If the elected representative prefers not to come forward, it is because he is perfectly aware of the “horrors” with which his services are sometimes confronted when they inspect old buildings.

“When you remove the partitions, you often see that people have tinkered with them over time.

In the wooden walls, there is brick, concrete.

It is these modifications that have weakened the envelope”, explains Mélanie Barchino, project manager at Territoires, a public company which is in charge of the construction site of the old center.


In 2008, a report established that 600 buildings in the historic center were degraded or even very degraded.

Why ?

Because many of the accommodations they house are reserved for students and the owners didn't bother to bring them up to standard.

"Anyway, they rented them, even when the apartment was bof", we slip to the municipality.

The strong tension on these small dwellings has only accentuated the phenomenon.

A lick of paint and presto...

Often bought to house their children while they were studying, these apartments were divided and then subdivided, giving rise to anarchic creations of bathrooms or toilets in places where they should never have been.

These dwellings were regularly retyped but only on the surface.

The tiles were ugly?

Let's glue a linoleum to it, then a laminate ten years later.

The wall is leaking a little?

A lick of paint and we're done talking about it.

The problem with these hacks is that they have often ravaged the structure of these century-old buildings, preventing the wood from breathing.

“On the floors, we sometimes discovered 60 centimeters of layers of concrete and superimposed floors,” says Mélanie Barchino.



Often very expensive, building maintenance work does not allow owners to rent more expensively, since the property is not embellished.

An obvious brake when you know that 70% of housing in the historic center is rented, sometimes owned by people who have left far from Rennes.

“It was worse twenty years ago.

We were 80% donors.

We managed to bring back owner-occupiers, that makes the files move forward, ”assures the elected socialist Didier Le Bougeant.

To make the woodwork breathe, a mixture of earth and hemp is now used and a lime plaster on the outside to protect it.

The secret recipe to save them. 

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  • Company

  • reindeer

  • Brittany

  • Inheritance

  • Building

  • Student housing

  • Lodging

  • Collapse

  • Immovable