Appointment of Pierre Paquet as director of the museums of the city of Liège

Pierre Paquet, a specialist in the conservation and restoration of cultural and immovable heritage and a professor in the Department of Architecture, Geology, Environment and Construction and the "Urban and Environmental Engineering" Research Unit of the University of Liège, has been appointed Director of the museums of the city of Liège. He therefore replaced Jean-Marc Gay as head of the Grand Curtius Museum, the Boverie Museum, the Ansembourg Museum, the Mulum (Musée du Luminaire) and the Grétry Museum.

B

orn in 1959, Pierre Paquet holds a degree in archaeology and art history from the University of Liège. He was an adviser to the Walloon Ministers in charge of heritage from 1993 to 2000. From 2000 to 2004, he was in charge of coordinating the "Urban Policy" programme for the City of Liège and in particular the "Grand Curtius" project. From 2004, he became Director of the Restoration Department of the Department of Heritage within the Walloon Public Service, then Inspector General of the Walloon Heritage Department, until December 2017. Adviser on territorial development at DGO4, he recently collaborated with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on cultural heritage management.

He has won several prizes over the course of his career, including the Larbalette Prize from the Liège Archaeological Institute in 1984 for his thesis on the Saint-Jacques church in Liège and the Cultural Heritage Prize in 1988 at the competition organised by the "Conservation Foundation" sponsored by the Ford Motor Company for the development project for the site of the former Stavelot Abbey, following the excavations he coordinated on this site for the University of Liège. At the European level, he was president of the international association of the European Heritage Network (Herein aisbl). He presides over the Centre d'art contemporain de La Chataigneraie in Flémalle (Liège). He is the author of several books on cultural heritage, in particular that of Wallonia.

Since 2006, he has been a professor at the University of Liège for the course "Conservation and restoration of immovable cultural heritage" given to civil engineers architects and, as an option, to civil engineers of buildings, as well as for the course "Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage - regulations in Wallonia, as part of the Master's degree in cultural heritage conservation and restoration. He is also a member of LEPUR (Research Center on City, Territory and Rural Sciences).

Illustration: "Maison Curtius" © Portail Liège Muséum