For the past 25 years, l'Ecole d'Avignon has been working at the heart of the rehabilitation field. From a vocational centre, it has evolved and developed into an internationally renowned resource centre. Today, it offers a series of services aiming at accompanying the three most important categories of role-players: contracting authorities from the private and the public sector, general contractors and those in charge of realizing the projects.
The great phases of its reflection :
The rehabilitation is a market but not yet a discipline. Nevertheless, the upkeep and the improvement fall within the scope of architecture and require more than technique; they are part of the work and coherent with it. Seen from that angle, this is a national subject; however, materials, techniques and expertise are realities that must be estimated locally, which is why the subject is also territorial.

The training of working people must be conceived as a close service. It must gain a foothold in the field. The training tool of improvement must be mobile, variable, and must allow for the re-forming a technical culture shared by the local communities' services, the operator, the architect and the craftsman.
More than 90% of the heritage buildings stock is the outcome of an architecture designed by professionals. Its heritage resides in a range of adaptation solutions - formal, technical, using only the cheap materials available locally - that the builders have perfected to create an architecture without architects; this heritage is the path covered between the clever and academic pattern and the expression in numerous local variants of a construction full of added value: how to create a worthy housing, that is to say with a digested architectural culture, small budgets and without any noble materials. This stock shows that a specific language has been created, a world full of the variety of the builders' techniques, which is the framework of our villages and cities' old centres. To intervene on this content is to characterize a heritage "without papers".
The rehabilitation conveys a message - about the value, the project and the method - which leads to new ways of practising. Spreading this message implies to be more present and to offer more support to the even more numerous role players. The teaching staff is also a team of consultants who takes part to the reflection, the making-up of the knowledge, the actions on space and buildings and the carrying out on the scaffolding. In 1989, to bring into play this necessary capillarity - from the intention to the outcome, from the decision-maker to the craftsman - the Region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur put in charge the Ecole d'Avignon of experiencing a regional service of rehabilitation and heritage. It is the only region who has
taken such an initiative and outsourced it. This service helps the territorial communities for a whole range of services: to show what they have got, to study the techniques, to imagine the tools for transfer (for instance the studies and the sample-suitcase for façades, the only reference for all the role-players), to characterize some campaigns, to produce some rules (for instance, the subsidy for a restoration: nature, extent, rate), to train (between or within companies, technical services, architects...), to assist on-site.