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Architecture, Modernity, Modernization

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Jean-Louis Cohen

Architecture, Modernity, Modernization

Inaugural Lecture delivered on Thursday 21 May 2014

Jean-Louis Cohen
Traduction de Liz Libbrecht

Texte intégral

1Mr Administrator,
Ladies and gentlemen Professors,
Dear Colleagues and Friends,

2I would like first of all to express my gratitude to you for having given me the opportunity to speak within these walls for several successive spring semesters. Beyond the recognition of the work that I have pursued during the past forty years, I see this invitation as a sign of a renewed interest in architecture as a discipline. This is why I would like to dedicate today’s reflection largely to architecture’s sometimes-troubled relations with the fields of knowledge, with literature, and with the city.

The architecture of the Collège de France

3The Collège de France has never discounted architecture, whether that meant, of course, calling on it to design the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève buildings in order to host its activities, or dedicating some of its courses to it. It is therefore fitting that I say a few words about the architecture of the Collège de France, before touching on architecture at the Collège de France. With its components arranged as a collage, the Collège has acquired an endearing architectural personality. Within the University district – as it was known in the Middle Ages, when Paris consisted of this area along with two other components, the Cité in the centre and the ville on the right bank of the Seine – its presence has been both strong and discreet. Overshadowed by the new Sorbonne erected by Henri-Paul Nénot at the end of the nineteenth century, it was built aside Charles Le Cœur’s Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and now stands among the very few modern apartment buildings of the area, such as, for instance, the one on rue Jean-de-Beauvais, designed with such refinement by Jean Le Couteur. The Collège’s personality is apparent, first and foremost, in its main building, which was designed by Jean-François Chalgrin in quite an elegant neoclassical style, after two centuries of the institution’s activities spread across several premises. Paul Letarouilly, whose delectable plates from Édifices de Rome Moderne were still religiously copied at the École des Beaux-Arts until the 1960s, designed its Rue Saint-Jacques gates.

  • 1 “Collège de France, bâtiment des amphithéâtres”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, November 1939, pp. 5 (...)

4The building, which is enclosed in a dense urban fabric, took on a more monumental stature during the Second Empire, when the Rue des Écoles was created, giving access to the former Place Cambrai, onto which its courtyard led. Hidden from passers-by is the Albert and Jacques Guilbert wing built in the interwar period to support the expansion of research (Fig. 1). Guilbert had studied with the author of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Auguste Perret, and this wing draws on Perret’s architectural language, although it unfortunately does not compare with the majesty of Perret’s republican palaces, even if it does borrow from them the vigorous tectonics of reinforced concrete. The clever superposition of amphitheatres was the only element to bring novelty to the architectural reflection on higher education buildings.1

Figure 1

Figure 1

Albert and Jacques Guilbert, physics and chemistry building for the Collège de France, 1925-1938, sectional view of the lecture halls.

Source: L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, November 1939, p. 51.

  • 2 See the collected essays by Peter Galison and Emily Thompson in The Architecture of Science, Cambri (...)
  • 3 Paul Turner’s book is still an essential reference on this theme: Paul Venable Turner, Campus. An A (...)
  • 4 Georges Gusdorf, L’Université en question, Paris, Payot, coll. “Études et documents”, 1964, p. 8.

5In 1991, the Collège de France launched an ambitious programme to transform all of its premises. The undertaking was headed by the acknowledged architect and interior designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte, in collaboration with Bernard Huet, who, for three decades, had been a powerful and appealing figure in the intellectual renewal of French architecture. The Collège thus participated in broader reflection on architecture for science and for spaces dedicated to research, to the exchange and the dissemination of discoveries – reflection embodied in hundreds of campuses created or transformed throughout the world. A long lineage of projects dating back to the Library of Alexandria bears witness to the hospitality of architecture towards knowledge. In the twentieth century, Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam (Fig. 2) and Louis I. Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla (California) are noteworthy examples that are relevant both to the field of scientific discovery and to that of architectural imagination.2 Excellence has not always been met everywhere, and France has its fair share of mediocre buildings, especially on its suburban campuses, which bear little resemblance to their British and American models – most notably due to the fact that they are hopelessly mono-functional.3 Hence, in 1964, the philosopher George Gusdorf commented in L’Université en question, “It is French universities’ architectural void that has brought me to understand their intellectual and spiritual void.”4 There is therefore more than pure form at stake.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Erich Mendelsohn, laboratory for Albert Einstein, Potsdam, 1921, general view in 2010.

Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen.

  • 5 Caroline van Eck has studied transfers from natural sciences in Organicism in Nineteenth-Century Ar (...)
  • 6 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, (...)
  • 7 The first publication on this subject was H.W. Kroto, J.R. Heath, S.C. O’Brien, R.F. Curl and R.E.  (...)

6At the same time as it was building palaces – and factories – for research, architecture was borrowing models and metaphors from science.5 Science, in turn, paid attention to architecture and appropriated notions such as “edifice”, “foundations” and, of course, “structure”. As Denis Hollier so rightly pointed out: “There is no way to describe a system without resorting to the vocabulary of architecture”.6 Occasionally, scientists explicitly pay homage to architectural figures. One striking example is that of fullerenes (Fig. 3), geometrically complex hollow carbon molecules discovered thirty years ago by Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. In 1985, they were named after the genius structural designer Richard Buckminster Fuller, due to their similarity with his geodesic domes.7

Figure 3

Figure 3

Fullerene C60, or buckyball.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Authors: Mstroeck and Bryn C for https://en.wikipedia.org. CC BY-SA 3.0. Image URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Fullerene#/​media/​File:C60a.png.

Architecture at the Collège de France

  • 8 Roland Recht, Leçon inaugurale faite le jeudi 11 mars 2002, Paris, Collège de France, 2002, p. 30; (...)

7Does this mean that science has been hospitable to architecture as an intellectual discipline, as a research field in and of itself? Most probably not. Looking solely at the Collège de France, the density of its own architecture and of the architecture surrounding it is reflected nowhere in its teachings. I am well aware that the history of architecture has been a feature in many professors’ lectures. This was recently the case when Roland Recht [Professor of History of European Medieval and Modern Art (2001-2012) at the Collège de France], a distinguished historian of Gothic architecture, opened his Inaugural Lecture in 2002 with considerations on the extent to which the “eminent” achievements of Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, Antoni Gaudí and even Frank Gehry “extend, expand and actualize a set of acquisitions made between 1140 and 1350 in north-western Europe”.8

  • 9 Charles Blanc, Grammar of Painting and Engraving [1873], Whitefish, Montana, Kessinger Publishing, (...)
  • 10 Paul Léon, La Renaissance des ruines, Paris, H. Laurens, 1918.
  • 11 André Michel, Histoire de l’art : depuis les premiers temps chrétiens jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, A (...)
  • 12 André Chastel, Le Grand Atelier d’Italie (1460-1500), Paris, Gallimard, 1965.
  • 13 Korkut E. Erdur, Albert Gabriel (1883-1972) : architecte, archéologue, artiste, voyageur, Istanbul, (...)

8It was also the case of the art historians who preceded him and who, each in their own way, took architectural problems into account. Charles Blanc was the first to do so. He became an inspiration for Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, an avid reader of Blanc’s Grammar of Painting and Engraving9, who became better known under his pseudonym, Le Corbusier. Paul Léon kept a close eye on the new discipline of city planning and on the reconstruction of monuments destroyed during World War I.10 André Michel, who was one of Blanc’s students and whose primary interest was sculpture, dedicated a fair share of his monumental Histoire de l’art to architecture.11 Henri Focillon, in the 1930s, and André Chastel, starting in 1970, focused on a particular artistic cycle or on a specific period of history. Chastel was also interested in contemporary architecture – an interest reflected for instance in his regular column in Le Monde. When studying the Renaissance, he never separated architecture from the other arts within “the great Italian workshop” – to quote the title of one of his most remarkable works.12 The only trained architect to have been awarded a Chair was Albert Gabriel, a specialist on Turkey who, from 1942, taught the History of Eastern Muslim arts.13

  • 14 Guillaume Le Blanc and Jean Terrel, Foucault au Collège de France : un itinéraire, Bordeaux, Pres (...)
  • 15 Christian de Portzamparc, Architecture : figures du monde, figures du temps, Paris, Collège de Fra (...)

9I will keep for another occasion a detailed analysis of his courses and those of archaeologists, for whom buildings have been and remain historical objects to be studied. Furthermore, one could hardly overlook the presence of architecture in Michel Foucault’s lectures devoted to the critique of hospitals, prisons, psychiatric hospices, and all institutional spaces shaped by power.14 And I am certain that the excellent lectures delivered in 2005 and 2006 by my friend Christian de Portzamparc, the first holder of the Annual Chair of Artistic Creation, have not been forgotten.15 As we can see, architecture has not been neglected at the Collège, even though its presence is diffuse.

Architectural research

  • 16 On the policies implemented at the time, see Éric Lengereau, L’État et l’Architecture. 1958-1981. (...)
  • 17 Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search, New York, Praeger, 1960.

10Over the last fifty years, architecture has also been the object of genuine scientific research in France. This initiative of setting up a dedicated public programme stemmed from a report written in 1971 at the behest of the Ministry of Cultural affairs. The author was André Lichnerowicz, who held the Chair of Mathematical Physics at the Collège de France from 1952 to 1986. Published under the title La Fonction architecturale, la recherche architecturale, this report led to the creation of the Committee for Research and Development in architecture (Comité pour la recherche et le développement en architecture/CORDA).16 Above all, the impetus given in 1971 prompted the emergence of an autonomous community, in which professionals were trained through research, and the creation of new research teams supported by architecture schools. At last, proper scientifically-grounded research existed alongside the “patient” research exclusively focused on design that Le Corbusier claimed to do in his atelier.17

  • 18 Jean-Louis Violeau described this process in “Artists and Architects in May 68: An Aesthetics of Di (...)
  • 19 Philippe Boudon, Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited [1969], Cambridge, Mass., M (...)

11Research on the history and theory of architecture has contributed towards a kind of intellectual reconstruction of the field of architecture in France, in parallel to the investigations dealing with quantifiable or modelizable forms of knowledge. These initially developed in such “reinsuring” domains as structures, morphology and structural geometry, in mathematics applied to architecture, and in social sciences applied to built objects and processes of design and usage.18 Architects were far from being the only players in this collective endeavour. Their works have intersected with those of art historians, sociologists, geographers and city planners, undertaken in their own institutional or disciplinary fields. Knowledge established in the specific field of architecture has sometimes been appropriated by historians, sociologists and anthropologists, and even by some professional designers. However, no global theory of the discipline has emerged from this abundant research, despite efforts by a few, such as Philippe Boudon. He sought to identify concepts specifically relevant to the field of architecture on the basis of their interpretation of the reception of modern schemes like Le Corbusier’s housing in Pessac, near Bordeaux.19 I doubt that it would still be possible today to construct such a theory.

  • 20 Jean-Louis Cohen, La Coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophi (...)
  • 21 I will simply quote Christian Devillers, Le Creusot : naissance et développement d’une ville indus (...)
  • 22 José Rafael Moneo, La solitudine degli edifici e altri scritti, Turin, Umberto Allemandi, 2004. Re (...)

12As a young lecturer and researcher, and later, as the scientific director of the aforementioned programme, I have been an actor in this process of renewal. As such, I cannot understate its fecundity. It established the existence of a research community and, above all, it confirmed that, in addition to the design of forms and spaces, architecture also produces discourse and had become able to train its own “organic” intellectuals – a word that I am borrowing from Antonio Gramsci – which had not always been the case in twentieth-century France.20 Research experience was crucial for educators who took up the responsibility of creating new schools after architecture had escaped from the rigid framework of the École des Beaux-Arts, to which it had been confined for a hundred and fifty years. However, it was just as important for young professionals engaged in the programmes of the 1970s, for example Christian Devillers, Patrick Berger or Christian de Portzamparc.21 In those years, many of the architects whose projects reached beyond an exhausted modernism and exhausting postmodernism first devised their strategies in writing. In Europe, this was the case of figures as different as Rafael Moneo and Rem Koolhaas, to mention only two of the most stimulating among them.22

Steps on my path

13My interest in architecture initially presented itself as a kind of a rebellion against the worship of science prevalent amongst the members of my family, most of whom were chemists, physicists and biologists – though my rebellion was tempered by my admiration for my grand-father, who was a linguist. I rebelled again later, against the corporate body of architects – at least in its stiffest French configuration – as soon as I discovered, across the Atlantic, the works of Americans, across the Alps, those of Italians, and, through Germany, those of Russians – in fact the theories and the designs of the 1920s, should I say, so sorry was the sight of the USSR in the days of Brejnev’s stagnation. Paternal, or rather avuncular, figures have set decisive points of inflection. The architects who shaped the discipline in the twentieth century, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, left behind them a fascinating collection of buildings, but to my generation their discourses seemed pompous and unproductive.

  • 23 Jean-Louis Cohen, “Hands that see: the CNAM lectures (1958-71)”, in Catherine Dumont d’Ayot & Bruno (...)
  • 24 They were following in the footsteps of Bernard Huet, whose trajectory Juliette Pommier has discuss (...)

14I will nevertheless always remember the weekly lectures by the extraordinary constructeur Jean Prouvé at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. In what truly were performances on stage23, he would draw a fascinating universe with the tip of his chalk, one in which buildings were often inspired by automobiles and airplanes (Fig. 4). Prouvé was a lone optimistic figure against the backdrop of a profession tainted by the cynicism with which it had embraced the state’s housing policies and interiorized the pressure of the market. At the time, the only great voice to be heard was Louis I. Kahn’s, resounding in Philadelphia, beyond an ocean that I was to cross only later, whereas some of my elders whom I envied had been studying there since 1960.24

Figure 4

Figure 4

Jean Prouvé delivering a lecture at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, around 1967.

  • 25 Françoise Choay, L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités; une anthologie, Paris, Seuil, 1965.
  • 26 Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935 [1967], New York (...)
  • 27 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/. Toward a History of Painting [1972], Stanford, Stanford Univer (...)

15In Paris I discovered with enthusiasm Françoise Choay’s Urbanisme, utopies et réalités [City Planning, Utopias and Realities], published in 1965, wherein she encouraged her readers to see theories proposed since the end of the nineteenth century as forming a matrix of ideas.25 Another inspirational book encounter took place with Anatole Kopp’s Town and Revolution, which, in 1967, shed light on the projects and illusions of the Russian avant-garde, and convinced me that I should travel to the East to see its vestiges and meet its surviving witnesses.26 After reading Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/, the seminar in which he presented architecture’s theoretical objects and his own views on urban landscapes – later brought together in Skyline: The Narcissistic City became a fertile haven in which I found refuge from the discourses of 1970s urban sociology, which I had come to find rather sterile.27

  • 28 Tafuri’s original discourse is included in his first book translated into French, which, unfortunat (...)
  • 29 Manfredo Tafuri, interview with Richard Ingersoll, “Manfredo Tafuri’s Historical Project”, Casabell (...)

16By then, Manfredo Tafuri had founded a department of History of Architecture at the University of Venice, in which collective research explicitly informed by Marxism and a critical engagement against canonical histories bore the promise of intellectually consistent works. Tafuri had appropriated the concepts of structural linguistics and, as a stepping-stone, drew on the Frankfurt school’s texts, which had been translated into Italian years before they were translated into French.28 Thanks to him, I read Theodor Adorno’s and Walter Benjamin’s seminal works for the first time in Dante’s tongue. His approach to contemporary architecture was also a guide for me, regardless of his controversial excesses, best condensed in his aphorism, “there is no criticism, there is only history”.29

  • 30 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” [1984], Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1986, p. 22.
  • 31 Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces [1973], Amherst, New York, Humanity B (...)
  • 32 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text [1973], New York, Hill and Wang, 1975.

17This archipelago of mobilizing discourses was not restricted to these islets where, as shipwrecked sailors preparing their return to inhabited lands, these authors and researchers strove to build makeshift rafts. The continents formed by the stimulating oeuvre of Parisian theoreticians were vast enough to mark out many paths, especially as several among them had formulated outstanding analyses of architecture. Discipline and Punish thus revealed Michel Foucault’s interest in detention places as part of “other” spaces – heterotopias, as he had defined them in 1967 during a lecture at the Cercle d’études architecturales, which, back then, was one of the most enlightened discussion arenas.30 Utopias were at the centre of many discourses in those years, and Louis Marin’s 1973 Utopics: Spatial Play, served to construct thoughts on them without any naivety or reductionism.31 Another way off the beaten tracks of art history and of a history of architecture that was basically hostile to any genuine analysis of forms was Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and, to some extent, The Pleasure of the Text.32 The most provocative ideas were found in theory rather than in art history.

  • 33 Jean-Louis Cohen, La Coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophi (...)

18After this exceedingly long preamble, I will now return to the proposed theme of today’s lecture “Architecture, modernity and modernization”, an overture to this year’s course on “Architecture and politics in twentieth-century France”. I will approach this topic as the product of the aforementioned phase of intellectual reconstruction, which I tried to conceptualize from a comparative point of view in one of my earliest publications. At the time I was intrigued by the relationships of dependence that seemed to have appeared between several groups of French architects and Italy. I therefore examined the phenomenon of Italophilia, which I felt revealed a sort of gap between architects and intellectuals in France, whereas in Italy, architects had been able to foster fertile relations with writers, philosophers, and historians.33 Amongst other Italian architects, I mentioned Vittorio Gregotti, who was closely related to Umberto Eco and the Gruppo ‘63, Giancarlo de Carlo, who was friends with the writer Elio Vittorini, and the relationship between Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Husserlian philosopher Enzo Paci.

  • 34 Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity [1990], New York, Columbia University Press, 199 (...)

19Questioning modernity in architecture – as Rem Koolhaas invited visitors to do at the 2014 Venice Biennale – takes more than simply compiling a registry of new elements in the lexicon of architecture, or following the axis of syntactics – if we are to use a linguistic model – and distinguishing new modes of composition and aggregation of forms that have been conceived since the formation of what has become known as the “modern movement” – which is most banally referred back to figures such as Wright, Le Corbusier, Gropius or Mies van der Rohe. As Antoine Compagnon has argued in his book The Five Paradoxes of Modernity34, modernity can be referred to as a celebration of novelty and a religion of the future – two attitudes that are frequently found in radical architects since the mid-nineteenth century. Visionary architect Hector Horeau was for instance strictly contemporaneous with Baudelaire – who is most definitely a figure with very few counterparts in architecture.

  • 35 Ibid., p. 28.
  • 36 Christian Freigang, “Sources et prémices de l’édifice théorique”, in Joseph Abram, Jean-Louis Cohen (...)

20In the field of architecture, the phenomenon of modernity however turns out to be more complex than in art or literature. The forms and space which have defined it pertain to thought systems and aesthetics that broke away from nineteenth-century historicism. However, they respond to programmes set out by the all-encompassing processes in which modernization at large consists, affecting production, consumption, the shape of territories and of society at large, all together. Synchrony between these two cycles of transformation – one aesthetic, the other economic and technical, with the latter defining the former’s programmes – has not always been the rule of modernity. This could also be said of the field of literature – Baudelaire, for instance, despised industry.35 Some modern programmes have thus been interpreted in light of traditionalist or nostalgic forms, as witnessed in Auguste Perret’s buildings, which exhibit a spirit of classical Hellenic inspiration.36 And modern forms can emerge in slowly evolving social structures, as was the case in Brazil. Modernity as a whole cannot be equated only to the avant-gardes, and we should not neglect the works of modern traditionalists, especially in Germany. One of the strongest temptations of these avant-gardes was the attempt to force-modernize everyday life by framing it in radically new forms. Russian constructivism comes to mind here.

  • 37 Bruno Reichlin, “Maison du peuple at Clichy, a masterpiece of ‘synthetic’ functionalism?”, Daidalos(...)

21One ideal-typical case of synchrony between modernity and modernization is that of Eugène Beaudouin, Marcel Lods, Vladimir Bodiansky and Jean Prouvé’s Maison du peuple, which opened its doors in 1939 in the Parisian suburb of Clichy (Fig. 5). Its light and transformable metallic structure simultaneously hosted a market, a cinema with retractable floorboards, and offices for local grass-root organizations. This was the inception of a type of public facility that would inspire the creators of the Centre George Pompidou thirty years later.37 A wholly different case is the Djenan el-Hassan housing estate in Algiers, designed in the 1950s by Roland Simounet, who was inspired by sociological observations of life in shanty towns and ethnographic observations of southern Algerian villages. The forms of clustering and the use of vaults made it comparable to the Maisons Jaoul and Le Corbusier’s Roq project, but it was part of a desperate – and long overdue – effort by a faltering colonial France to meet the Muslim population’s expectations. Meanwhile, for the reconstruction of Marseille’s Old Harbour, Fernand Pouillon had resorted to the traditional form of stone-built archways, although admittedly they were completed by a concrete floor. His project was conservative in many respects but its built volume and rationalized construction work did nevertheless fall within the scope of the post-war modernization programme.

Figure 5

Figure 5

Eugène Beaudouin, Marcel Lods, Vladimir Bodiansky and Jean Prouvé, Maison du peuple, Clichy, 1939 (general view).

  • 38 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete [1928], Los Angel (...)
  • 39 Ibid., p. 152.

22In his earliest book on modern architecture, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete38, published in 1928, Swiss historian of art Sigfried Giedion set the “constructive spirit” as a constant characteristic of a country’s national scene. To him, “[t]he constructional temperament of France is as indispensable for the new architecture as America’s organizational aptitude or – in its place – Holland’s handicraft aptitude”39. Giedion’s analysis was informed as much by his knowledge of post-World War I France, where he had visited construction sites, as by that of nineteenth-century French engineers’ works, which he had discovered in the libraries of Paris and during field trips.

  • 40 Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Construire en fer : histoire et esthétique [1906], Gollion, Infolio, 2005.
  • 41 This broader field is the topic of my book L’Architecture au xxe siècle en France ; modernité et co (...)

23One of his inspirations was Alfred Gotthold Meyer’s Eisenbauten, the first book devoted to the aesthetics of metallic structures (Fig. 6), largely focused on France, which had been published twenty years earlier.40 The fact that both Giedion’s and Meyer’s books have been published in Germany does tend to confirm the idea that a strictly “French” history of “French” architecture is absurd. Empirically, reflection must extend to a much broader field and include the contributions of foreign architects – I am thinking of projects such as Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Ove Arup’s Centre Pompidou, or Marcel Breuer, Pier-Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss’ Unesco – as well as projects developed abroad and beyond the colonies and protectorates that acquired independence in the 1950s and1960s.41

Figure 6

Figure 6

Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Eisenbauten, 1908. The cover shows Félix Dutert and Victor Contamin’s 1889 Galerie des machines.

  • 42 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922, New Y (...)
  • 43 For a classic reference, see Arthur Drexler (ed.), The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, Lo (...)

24It would not however be any less of an over-simplification to see the national aspect in opposition to a standardizing form of internationalism, as reactionary critics such as Gustave Umbdenstock, Camille Mauclair and Alexander von Senger did in the 1930s. There was indeed an “international” style, as codified by the curators of the first architecture exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1932.42 However, if there has been a genuine international style, it cannot be identified with the works of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier. It is rather the one that had developed at the École des Beaux-Arts a century earlier. This school of thought and of design, which upheld eclecticism as a form of freedom in language, turned out to be particularly efficient in defining the spatial layout and external shape of banks, train stations – or at least of their front façade –, operas, parliaments and, for almost fifty years, even skyscrapers.43

  • 44 Jean-Louis Cohen, “Le culture della modernizzazione: il balletto delle egemonie”, in Maria Luisa Sc (...)

25In fact, from the time that the model established by the Parisian school entered a crisis, a ballet of sort was staged, where hegemonies succeeded one another and sometimes added themselves to one another.44 Thus, architectures designed in France – whether they were built in France or not – have expressed ideas and issues of widely diverse origins. In the field of domestic architecture, the idealized British home gave way to Californian villas, while the garden-cities inspired by those in England were transformed upon contact with Berlin’s and Frankfurt’s Siedlungen. In the post-World War II years, tectonics drawn from Finnish architecture, curves from Brazil, and Californian attitudes receptive to landscape offered a more poetic architectural writing to counter the rational style of Perret and his disciples, effective as far as Morocco. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, American types have always be present, be it in offices, factories, commercial buildings or housing. Any attempt at interpreting projects or finished works through a narrowly national prism would therefore be futile. A transnational approach to history is inevitable.

Architects and books

  • 45 Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth (eds), Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds”, Los Ange (...)
  • 46 Niklas Maak, Der Architekt am Strand. Le Corbusier und das Geheimnis der Seeschnecke, Munich, Carl (...)

26A transdisciplinary history would not be any less fruitful. The visual efficiency of illustrations and layout in the aforementioned book by Giedion simply highlights his blindness to other dimensions of the oeuvre of those architects that he studied. Many of them had an intense relation to literature. The modern architects were readers as much as they were builders. In 1908, and again in the late 1950s, Le Corbusier devoured Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra – which was a bedside book for many architects of his generation throughout Europe.45 He was an avid reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and found some of the expressions that made him famous in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry, before taking the best out of Paul Valéry’s Man and the Seashell.46 In his old age, he would take advantage of his long flights to India to restlessly read and annotate Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as well as George Bataille’s The Accursed Share.

  • 47 Alain Guiheux and Olivier Cinqualbre (eds), Tony Garnier, l’œuvre complète, Paris, Centre Pompidou, (...)

27Auguste Perret, who was Le Corbusier’s mentor, drew inspiration for the oft-sententious aphorisms of which his theoretical discourse was made, from Eupalinos or the Architect, a Socratic dialogue written by Valéry in 1921 to accompany a portfolio devoted to the work of the two architects/decorators, Louis Suë and André Mare. Tony Garnier, who was a few years older than him, was a stereotypical Beaux-Arts alumnus until he rebelled against the school from the Villa Medicis, which was its Roman subsidiary back in those days. The inspiration for his “Industrial City” programme, an ideal project that he designed in several phases between 1901 and 1917, was Work, one of Émile Zola’s four Gospels.47

  • 48 Frantz Jourdain, “Dédicace”, in L’Atelier Chantorel, Paris, G. Charpentier and E. Fasquelle, 1893. (...)

28Not only were architects readers, they were also the interlocutors of writers and philosophers, as they sometimes were of artists, to whom they paid tribute. Such was Henry Van Velde’s case. Before 1914 he drew several projects that were dedicated to Nietzsche, and designed the building preserving his archives in Weimar, where he had founded his art school. Louis Bonnier, who at the time supported Art Nouveau, built André Gide’s house at Villa Montmorency, in Paris. Frantz Jourdain, the creator of La Samaritaine department store, gave Émile Zola valuable information about the realm of Parisian retail, which the author used in writing Au bonheur des dames. Later, he also designed Zola’s tomb in the Montmartre cemetery (Fig. 7). Jourdain was in fact closer to the Goncourt brothers than he was to the author of the Rougon-Macquart, and he dedicated his 1893 novel L’Atelier Chantorel to Jules. This novel was a long diatribe against the École des Beaux-Arts, in which he stigmatized his former fellows’ crass ignorance and their hostility to contemporary art, music and literature.48

Figure 7

Figure 7

Frantz Jourdain, funereal monument for Émile Zola, Montmartre cemetery, 1902.

Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen

  • 49 Martin Heidegger, “Bauen, wohnen, denken”, in Otto Bartning (ed.), Mensch und Raum, Darmstädter Ges (...)
  • 50 Bruno Zevi, “Concerning architectural culture”, Metron, nos. 31-32, 1949, p. 11 [from the original (...)

29These encounters were between individuals whose relationships ranged from friendship to collaboration, unlike the Prussian Akademie der Künste, where Thomas Mann and Mies van der Rohe sat next to each other until 1933. In Germany, one of the turns in the post-World War II public debates was the Darmstädter Gespräch, in 1951, where Martin Heidegger gave his lecture “Bauen, wohnen, denken” [Buiding, living, thinking], in which phenomenology met architecture. This contribution led to the public challenging of the Bauhaus ideals, among others.49 During the same years, Italian architects engaged in a passionate conversation with neorealist writers and film-makers. These kinds of institutional encounters and group actions hardly occurred in France, where the École des beaux-arts’ anti-intellectual tradition was perpetuated. Yet, as historian and critic Bruno Zevi argues, there can be no discontinuity between architecture and culture. He was probably the first to coin the phrase “architectural culture” in his critique of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, a history book turned into a catechism, which he published in 1941 to celebrate Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius’ hegemony. On this topic, he wrote: “Architecture and architectonic culture are one and the same thing. If architecture is not infused with a rich, living and stimulating critical sense, it degenerates into mere mannerism.”50

  • 51 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre, Paris, G. Charpentier & Cie, 1886, pp. 176-177.

30This was mirrored by many writers’ attention to architecture. Zola studied Parisian department stores, but his novels also contained thoughts on the future of construction. In L’Œuvre, he picked a side and gave Claude Lantier’s character – inspired by Paul Cézanne – a fully-fledged programme, describing “something vast and strong, great and simple at the same time; the something that was already being indicated in the new railway stations and markets, whose ironwork displayed such solid elegance, but purified and raised to a standard of beauty, proclaiming the grandeur of the intellectual conquests of the age”.51

Writers and Architecture

31As a field that is open to speculative imagination, architecture has also been considered by writers from the point of view of its principles and its relations with other arts. In the very first text he published, “Paradox on the architect” (1891), Paul Valéry echoed Schelling, who had seen a gefrorene Musik in architecture, and likened the “architect of the Future” to a musician:

  • 52 Paul Valéry, “Paradox on the Architect”, Collected Works of Paul Valery, vol. 4, Princeton, New Jer (...)

When, free from things visible and expressed types, he has found the symbol and synthesis of the Inner Universe which obscurely troubled him, then that will and thought of a larger music will compose his original creation like a lofty symphony. […] And thus will become manifest the ineffable correspondence, the intimate infinity which must be discerned, under the veils of custom and deceit, between two incarnations of art, between the royal façade of Reims and some page of Tannhäuser, between the ancient magnificence of a great heroic temple and some supreme andante, gloriously aflame.52

  • 53 Luc Fraisse, “Émile Mâle et le secret perdu de la Recherche”, in Sjef Houppermans et al., Marcel Pr (...)

32Yet another equivalence has been drawn between the structure of a building and that of a book. Marcel Proust, who was a friend of the art historian Émile Mâle and happened to be acquainted with Viollet-le-Duc’s analyses, which he had read while preparing to translate John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens, admitted in 1919 that he had used the Amiens cathedral (Fig. 8) as the organizing principle of his work.53 In a letter to painter Jean de Gaigneron, he wrote:

  • 54 Marcel Proust, Letter to Jean de Gaigneron, August 1919, quoted by Jean Rousset, Forme et significa (...)

When you speak of a cathedral, I can but be moved by the intuition that allowed you to guess what I had never told anybody, and which I am writing here for the first time. I had planned on naming each part of my book: Porch I, abse’s stained-glass window, etc., to reply in advance to the stupid criticism that I get for a lack of construction in books of which, I will show you, the only merit lies in the solidity of every single part.54

  • 55 On Mies van der Rohe’s readings, see Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word. Mies Van Der Rohe on the Bui (...)

33One may find in this equivalence an anticipation of that which Erwin Panofsky later drew between scholastic theses and Gothic cathedrals. A broader historical perspective leads back to Saint-Thomas, who’s Summa is based on an analogy with architecture – which, in turn, was an essential source for Mies van der Rohe, who read it closely.55

Figure 8

Figure 8

John Ruskin, detail of the western façade of the Amiens Cathedral, watercolour, 1856. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

  • 56 Georges Bataille, “Architecture”, Documents, no. 2, March 1929, p. 117, in Hollier, Against Archite (...)
  • 57 Adolf Loos, “Architektur” [1910], in Trotzdem: 1900-1930, Innsbruck, Brenner, 1931, p. 107.

34In 1929, when Georges Bataille denounced the architecture of great monuments as being a prison warden, he was seeing in this state of submission the hold of a tyrannical apparatus reaching far beyond the realm of buildings, “in physiognomy, costume, music or painting”. No longer seen as remarkable in its ability to organize discourse, architecture became a force that imposed silence upon the “masses” through “the logic of majesty and authority”.56 Just as Bataille was writing this article, an unprecedented housing development programme was launched consequent to the law on public funding for housing, known by the name of the Minister of Labour overseeing it, Louis Loucheur. This programme initiated a kind of popular appropriation of architecture, which took on a very different meaning in the field. By equating architecture to monumental structures and to the institution of places of power, Bataille missed this everyday aspect of it. In this, he seems to have validated the position expressed by Adolf Loos in 1910: “Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else, everything which serves a purpose should be excluded from the realm of art.”57

35Bataille’s forceful indictment relied on an implicit reduction of architecture to the great buildings in which power is condensed and staged. My generation shared this anti-authoritarian vision, which, through a sort of return of the repressed, often mutated into unbridled formalism a few years later. Paradoxically, the twentieth century saw architecture, in its practical, artistic, and technical aspects, cease to be exclusively aimed at aristocrats and bourgeois, and to start giving structure and shape to programmes aimed at the working classes. In offering a music rather than just a repressive order – as Bataille thought –, architecture turned to programmes outside of the realm of monuments per se: houses, schools, and residential buildings.

  • 58 Walter Prigge (ed.), Ernst Neufert: normierte Baukultur im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt-am-Main, Camp (...)
  • 59 Umberto Eco, foreword to Vittorio Gregotti, Le Territoire de l’architecture [1966], Paris, L’Équerr (...)

36At this point, I would like to shift our attention from stone books to paper books – two terms that Victor Hugo contrasted. Far from all being hell-bent on putting the world in order, architects have combined building-design with designing printed works that have had little to do with those in which they set out the principles of their art, from Vitruvius, to Vignola, to his modern heir, the functionalist Ernst Neufert, who was a right-hand man to Walter Gropius and, later, to Albert Speer.58 These books were also different from those that aimed to reveal their built works, such as Andrea Palladio’s Quattro Libri or Le Corbusier’s Complete Works. Contrary to Victor Hugo’s prediction, in Notre Dame de Paris, paper did not replace stone, precisely because stone resisted through books, which are still a medium of architecture to this day. For some authors who had been trained in architecture, writing these books was a form of escape, a way to move away from it. Among them was Michel Bataille, in France, as well as Siegfried Kracauer, who became a columnist and a historian of cinema, as well as Max Frisch, who became a playwright. For those who remained loyal to their original discipline, writing participated in what Umberto Eco, in his foreword to the French translation of Gregotti’s Il territorio dell’architettura, called “the Leonardian dream” of architects, which “reflect the Renaissance ideal of a total intellectual who, through his project, seeks to harmonize all the issues and solutions in the culture of his times”.59

  • 60 The proceedings of the symposium L’Architecte à la plume, organized in May 2010 by Paris Nanterre U (...)

37An extreme form of plurality in the use of media appeared when Viollet-le-Duc, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier doubled their built oeuvre with an abundant production of texts exploring a variety of perspectives and genres, from pamphlets to confidences, manifestoes and illustrated albums. This scriptural drive is part of a persuasion strategy. It can be clearly set apart from the strategy that led so many architects to write dull prescriptive books or plain accounts of their production, insofar as it results in the formulation of the theoretical or biographical frames within which their projects are intelligible.60

  • 61 Fernand Pouillon, Mémoires d’un architecte, Paris, Seuil, 1968. Paul Andreu, Enfin : roman, Paris, (...)
  • 62 Georges Candilis, Bâtir la vie, Paris, Stock, 1977; Pierre Dufau, Un architecte qui voulait être ar (...)

38A very small number of professionally legitimate architects have engaged in writing more literary books, as did Fernand Pouillon or, more recently, Paul Andreu61, but architects’ preferred genre has unquestionably been memoirs. It was easy to get them published, especially as the authors could do so at their own expense – and, if needed be, with help from their companies. Books that seldom elicited more than complacency, such as the memoirs of Georges Candilis, Pierre Dufau, Marcel Lods or Pierre Vago – in alphabetical order – appear to be narcissistic outpourings to be read with circumspection, rather than proper novels.62

  • 63 Jean-Louis Cohen, introduction to Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture [1923], Los Angeles, Getty R (...)
  • 64 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Chuihua Judy Chung, (...)

39Alongside doctrinal statements and tools of persuasion, books could also be used for reporting, opening the public eye on unknown or unseen realities. Le Corbusier invited his reader, with eminently Mallarméan wording, to open eyes that “did not see” ocean liners, automobiles and airplanes.63 Fifty years later, Paul Virilio invited his readers to see the bunkers on the Atlantic Wall, and Rem Koolhaas revealed the mysteries of the Pearl River in Southern China.64

40Architects are professionals in the field of the visible, and their illustrated books are also graphic and aesthetic projects. Valéry, who paid close attention to what he called the book’s “physique”, borrowed one of Le Corbusier’s slogans in order to say that he saw the contemporary book as “a perfect reading machine”. This is how he described the two virtues of a book:

  • 65 Paul Valéry, “Two Virtues of a Book”, The Living Age, 1 February 1928, pp. 262-64.

Quite apart from the process of reading, every written thing enjoys an existence of its own, an individual entity. A page is an image. It gives a total impression, presents a block or a system of blocks and strata, of blacks and whites, a birthmark of more or less happy intensity. This attitude is neither more successive nor more progressive than reading. It is immediate and simultaneous, it provides a common ground for typography and architecture, just as reading should also remind us of music and all other arts that involve an expense of time.65

41Valéry was attentive to many aspects of architecture. Let us not forget that, from 1937 to 1945, he held the Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France.

From buildings to cities

42As I have chosen to base these lectures on two themes, architecture and the urban form, I must make a brief opening statement. The tension between buildings and cities has been strongly intensified by modernity, to the extent that the hostility with which new architecture has been met in many countries has been partly due to its inability to create liveable urban environments. It obviously cannot bear all of the blame for this, as it has been over-determined by crises, inequalities and the appropriation of modern ideals by state or corporate interests. In this respect, I am fully aware of the social factors at play in the fact that two buildings with almost identical forms can have opposite destinies, as happened with Le Corbusier’s Unités d’habitation: the one in Marseille became an investment much sought after by academics and psychoanalysts, while its twin in Briey-en-Forêt became an abandoned shell once the laid-off steel workers had deserted it. In these two opposite urban situations the optimistic prototype in Lorraine became a ruin, before activists later invented a new use for it.

  • 66 “Architecture”, Genesis, no. 14, 2000.
  • 67 Bruno Reichlin, Dalla “soluzione elegante” all’ “edificio aperto”, scritti attorno ad alcune opere (...)
  • 68 Bruno Reichlin, “Una sfida al sistema architettonico della tradizione. Il padiglione Church a Ville (...)

43The architectural object can be conceived of within its own autonomous set of design and production rules. There are several methods, which are clearly linked to the field of literature, for objectivizing and analyzing these rules. I am thinking of genetic analyses as Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s, which are productive in tracing the steps in design processes66; or of Bruno Reichlin’s essays, in which he uses rhetorical figures to account for the layouts designed by Le Corbusier or Luigi Moretti67 – I am thinking, foremost, of his beautiful interpretation of the openings in the Villa Church’s pavilion, in the composition of which he highlighted a decisive chiasmus.68

  • 69 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City [1966], Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1982.
  • 70 Vittorio Gregotti, Le Territoire de l’architecture [1966], op. cit.
  • 71 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1 (...)

44Over the past fifty years, the relationship between the architectural object and the urban space and landscape has been the focus of attention for two generations. It was, for instance, a recurring theme in three seminal books published within a few months of one another in 1966 – as if the aim had been to inaugurate the last third of the twentieth century on new bases: Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della città, Vittorio Gregotti’s Il territorio dell’architettura, and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Through their divergences, their problematics show a measure of what was then at stake. Rossi considered the city as an artefact, a collective work of architecture in a sense, relying on the work of French geographers and on Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory.69 Using the metaphorical idea of territory as a reference when trying to expand the realm of architecture as a discipline, Gregotti also aimed to operate on the scale of large geographical systems, which he put into practice in his projects for the universities of Florence, Calabria, and Palermo.70 As for Venturi, his discourse focused on works taken individually. In studying Roman churches – about which he coined the idea of “inflexion” – he accounted for the adjustment of buildings to urban spaces.71 These three books were published about fifteen years before the first public appearance of the postmodern strategies, made at the Venice Biennale in 1980 alongside Paolo Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima. In 1966, while Gregotti attempted to perpetuate the Moderns’ attitude by proposing architecture on the scale of large landscape layouts, Rossi and Venturi criticized the idea of an autonomous architecture based on its own constituting rules and totally disregarded urban complexity.

  • 72 Rafael Moneo, “On Typology”, Oppositions, no. 13, 1978, pp. 23-45. Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typol (...)

45I will not give in to the religion of continuity between the city and its buildings, illustrated by the episode of the so-called “proliférants” – the expansive pyramidal buildings that were fashionable in France in the early 1970s – and by 1960s and 1970s so-called “urban” architecture in Italy. This discourse was prolonged by Rafael Moneo and Anthony Vidler’s analyses. Vidler saw cities as a “third typology”, after historicism and machine aesthetics.72 I would like to examine the multiple literal or structural forms of relationship between built objects and urban ensembles, without contrasting to the extreme these two terms that correspond far less to two scales than to two technical, social and artistic systems. Even if architecture refused to be determined by regulated templates, layouts or aesthetics, it would still be framed by urban space, consisting not only of the combination of a geographical substratum, fluxes, networks and artificial landscapes, but also of a continuum of buildings.

  • 73 It is always useful to refer in this respect to Massimo Cacciari’s anthology, Metropolis: Saggi sul (...)

46Although they have affected rural spaces, which have gradually been depopulated by unprecedented migrations, modernity and modernization found their framework and their perspectives in cities. The first third of the twentieth century saw the emergence of metropolises, of which Germany and the United States were the main stages. As Georg Simmel’s analysis then showed, this phenomenon transformed ways of thinking, while it also determined architecture, as Karl Scheffler’s or August Endell’s suggested concerning the form and aesthetics of the Großstadt.73 Conversely, Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre critically analysed these large buildings, be they train stations or department stores, revealing how they condensed the characteristics of large capitalistic cities.

  • 74 Hubert Damisch, Skyline. The Narcissistic City, op. cit., pp. 12-15.

47There is more at stake than just the material adjustment to the city of buildings, monuments or houses, or than fitting a privately or publicly ordered product in the more complex ensemble of which the city consists, and which is determined by political and economic considerations. Objective parameters such as density, height, axiality, and topography are subjected to artistic and subjective interpretations in which myths and representations are at play. The elaboration of a “Parisian”, “Berliner” or “Carioca” architecture requires either an adjustment to specific stereotypes or, by opposition, an inductive effort to overcome them. Such an endeavour defeats the objectivity – or the claim thereof – that would define an architecture only in relation to commissions, from the moment that imagination is fed by dreams and desires, as Hubert Damisch has noted in Skyline. The Narcissistic City.74

48I will now briefly and perhaps schematically draw up a list of the successive and opposing attitudes to the adjustment of buildings and cities since the end of the nineteenth century. The compositions elaborated by École des beaux-arts alumni did not pertain solely to monumental Third Republic programmes in Paris, French regions and the Empire. They were also exported to the Americas – from Chicago to Buenos Aires –, the Balkans and the Middle East, where they formed urban ensembles informed by the Haussmannian model. Paradoxically, although these projects drawn up at the École were designed on abstract grounds, with contemptuous indifference to the site, their combination around squares and along streets has nevertheless formed legible, albeit sometimes grandiloquent, urban ensembles.

  • 75 Louis Bonnier, Les Règlements de voirie, Paris, Charles Schmid, 1903.
  • 76 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice [1909], New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

49In times of social reform policies, the sublime order of large squares and vertiginous perspectives of boulevards lined by the horizontal continuity of balconies partially gave way to a picturesque order, founded on an aspiration to variety and individuality in buildings. This new principle guided the new Parisian building code, drafted in 1902 by Louis Bonnier and enforced until the 1960s.75 The same preoccupation with contrast and animation is also found across garden-city projects, which were often inspired by the layouts of British, French, and German villages. Thus, in his 1909 manual Town Planning in Practice, Raymond Unwin used his sketches of small Normandie towns to draw the squares and the roads of his British garden cities.76 Their houses can only be thought of as juxtaposed, as they are inseparable from one another (Fig. 9).

Figure 9

Figure 9

Raymond Unwin, village square, illustration from Town Planning in Practice, 1909.

50Moderns designers, who were initially trained in one or both of these methods – formal or picturesque composition – firmly opposed any continuity with the towns and villages of the past. Not out of ignorance – Frank Lloyd Wright had participated in the making of modern Chicago and Le Corbusier started off as a heated advocate of garden- and medieval cities – but out of their hatred of old cities and their will to assert themselves through their opposition to it. Wright grew against Chicago, and Le Corbusier against Paris, which he also meant to seduce through a caricatural vision of the city reduced solely to its historical buildings.

  • 77 Bernard Huet, “La città come spazio abitabile, alternative alla Carta di Atene”, Lotus, no. 41, 198 (...)
  • 78 [Translator’s note: in French, these housing estates are called “grands ensembles” which literally (...)
  • 79 Jean-Luc Godard, scenario of Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1967, in Marie Cardinal, Cet (...)

51Whilst the Beaux-Arts were indifferent to the existing city and intent on replacing it with new layouts, be they axial or picturesque, the Moderns were even more radical and thought they would ignore it, or worse still, indict it for its density and insalubrity, and raze it. To the logic of one-off interventions and extension by fragments, they opposed that of large blankets of towers or bars, formed according to the model of Fordist industry, for the managers of the organization era. Combined with prefabrication and large state investments, this approach allowed for low-cost housing to be mass-produced, thus partly satisfying the needs of populations – although the idea that conventional solutions would not have had similar results still has to be demonstrated. As Bernard Huet wrote, The Athens Charter, published by Le Corbusier in 1943 with Jean Giraudoux’s backing, suggested “an anti-idea of cities”.77 At the same time, radical architects were rejoicing in the destruction of European cities, opening the way for their replacement with rational and crystalline entities such as the “4000” housing estate in La Courneuve. In Two or Three Things I Know About Her – which was shot there in 1967 – Jean-Luc Godard saw these schemes or sets of buildings78 as an illustration of the notion of “sets as they are conceived of in mathematics, that is to say, total structures in which the basic human unit is governed by laws that are beyond it, precisely because they are ‘set laws’”.79

52Nineteenth-century solutions, such as the Haussmannian city and its system of closed islets, can retrospectively be seen as a counterpoint to twentieth-century bars. Christian de Portzamparc thus opposed the “age 1” of the modern city, with its characteristically continuous fabric and corridor-streets, to the “age 2”, defined by the dislocation of space in discrete buildings, separated by shapeless areas. Although I am very interested in “age 3”, which he meant to inaugurate with his concept of the “open block” and which has proven to be sound in many of his projects, I would like to advocate for “age 1.5”, that is, all the attempts at transforming the city that emerged in the early days of industry, without however reducing urban spaces to a serial juxtaposition of bars and towers. I have in mind the large blocks of German plans from before 1914, Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s 1917 plan for the south of Amsterdam, Rome’s 1920s urban ensembles, Giuseppe Terragni’s 1930s urban bars, and the transfigured garden-cities in Radburn and in American Greenbelt Cities.

  • 80 Gaston Bardet, Le Nouvel urbanisme, Paris, Vincent & Fréal, 1948. On this controversial figure, see (...)

53Here, the term “ages” reaches its limits, for those defined by Portzamparc overlap and were not strictly consecutive. In this intermediate approach, there have been ones that aimed to escape the tyranny of grand composition – be it in its Beaux-Arts or its functionalist version – and the law of large numbers mentioned by Godard. Gaston Bardet, an ardent critic of the Moderns and so passionate a city planner that he sank into mysticism in his old days, designed one of these alternatives. He was close to the Catholic circle Économie et humanisme, and had a twofold connection to historian Marcel Poëte, as he was married to his daughter and became his exegete. By means of his theory of “levels”, he endeavoured rigorously to adjust social morphology to urban morphology, so as to conceive of the city not only as an aggregate of buildings, but also as a combination of communities sharing the resources of an agglomeration (Fig. 10).80

Figure 10

Figure 10

Gaston Bardet, The city, a cluster rather than a target, illustration from Pierre sur pierre, 1946.

  • 81 Pierre Lavedan, Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme ?, Paris, H. Laurens, 1926, pp. 6-7.

54Although Bardet was interested in the social substrate of urbanism, the notion of an “urban” architecture seemed, at one time, to condense the hopes of those who wished to restore the complexity of historic cities. Pierre Lavedan had used it in his Histoire de l’urbanisme, so as to account for an approach centred solely on the coherent ensembles of new cities.81 Aldo Rossi and his colleagues, however, saw urbanity less as a datum than as an aspiration, a quality that architecture could recover if it was grounded on a rigorous study of historical cities through which their specific characteristics could be understood and legitimately interpreted.

The narcissism of architecture

  • 82 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, New York, Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 495.

55The relationship between the building, the city and the landscape is still one of the main terms on which the currents of contemporary architecture differ. Twenty years ago, in a text that became as famous as it was misunderstood, Rem Koolhaas criticized large self-sufficient buildings. According to him, their slogan – to which he was often erroneously accused of adhering – was “Fuck context!”.82 The triple tower, which was completed in 2014, shows how much more complex his position is, as it tends, precisely, to create a context in a Rotterdam site torn apart by occasional interventions. On the tip of an island bristling with skyscrapers as if they were needles planted in a cushion – if I may use the image of Manhattan seen from the bay, that Henry James brought back from his trip to New York in 1904 –, this equally singular and multiple building gives a sort of a frame to its neighbours which, by their sole juxtaposition, could hardly create a genuine metropolitan landscape (Fig. 11). At the other end of the spectrum of attention to context is the heed which other architects give to finding traces, which are sometimes slim remains, of the history of a site, on which to base their projects through poetic interpretation. Their approach is diametrically opposed to the policy of tabula rasa to which their predecessors had resigned themselves in the wake of the Second World War – when they had not openly called for it, as did Frank Lloyd Wright.

Figure 11

Figure 11

Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), “De Rotterdam” building seen from the northern bank of the Maas, Rotterdam, 2014.

Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen.

  • 83 Marc Augé, “L’architecture globale”, Le Monde, October 18-19, 2009.
  • 84 Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building. The Power of Enigma, New York, Rizzoli, 2005.
  • 85 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre, op. cit.

56In 2009, Marc Augé, an eloquent explorer of the “non-sites” of contemporary cities, published in Le Monde an opinion column on “global architecture”, in which he found himself wishing that “architects could free themselves from the culture of ‘projects’, this ‘as we go along’ way of thinking imposed by the ideology of consumption, so as to stay or again to become the world’s visionaries”.83 There, Augé was strangely trapped in a dominant representation of architecture that limits it to the grand – and often kitsch – gestures of the stars of the global entertainment society of spectacle that Charles Jencks called “iconic”.84 His tones were those of Bataille, forgetting along the way the energy expended by tens of thousands of practitioners equipped precisely with this “culture of projects” applied to prosaic programmes. They were putting this energy not so much into large buildings – be they airports, operas or museums –, the new temples of contemporary society, but rather into housing, schools, community services, and all elements of everyday life. Theirs was a quest for what Zola termed “the architectural formula of democracy” when, in 1886, he called on architects to leave “the forever impoverished combinations of stone” so as to “search for the monumental forms derived from the properties of iron”.85 Alongside the representation of political or economic power, architecture shapes the daily framework of social politics. Giving it a spatial and aesthetic quality is not incompatible with the practical qualities it must have, and it is precisely in the poetic transposition of uses that architecture is now giving the best of itself and fully participating in the realm of politics.

  • 86 Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present. Inventing Architectural Modernism, Cambridge, M (...)
  • 87 Siegfried Kracauer, History. The Last Things before the Last [1969], Princeton, New Jersy, Markus W (...)

57In order to account for the cycles in which architecture, thus broadly defined, has changed, rather than applying historical methods that see it as an impervious field, I propose to include it fully within history, while considering temporal continuities as well as crises and breaking points. The material of this history is multiple: oral testimonies, archives and texts, the prime documents being the buildings cross-referenced with the discourses that generated and accompanied them. In order to organize and interpret them, one must constantly change focus. As Vidler reminds us86, in History, the Last Things before the Last (1969), Siegfried Kracauer described historical inquiry as navigation between two types of vision, which he compared to film shots: the panoramic type of shot, a large-scale perspective, and the close-up one. The former would account for the overall structures of what would be a macro-story, while on the microscopic scale, the latter allows us to discover destinies and human experiences.87 The history of architecture, as I conceive of it, calls for permanent navigation between these visions: a vision of urban ensembles framed in panoramic shots, which accounts for social or technical policies, and a vision of buildings and their interiors, from close-up, which accounts for the ideals and engagements of their authors and inhabitants.

58In conclusion, two examples will allow me to clarify these ideas. Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s Maison de Verre, designed on an enlightened intellectual’s order, has been hidden in a Parisian courtyard since 1932. With its open spatiality and deliberate use of unfinished industrial materials (Fig. 12), it nonetheless corresponds to the general system of aesthetic modernity. By contrast, the Le Mirail housing estate, with which Candilis, Josic and Woods meant to create a replica of the old town of Toulouse in 1961, was intended to host thousands of individual destinies; it condensed all the ambitions lodged in nationwide housing estate policies. Both participated in the same history. I will provide one last example, that of the condition of the discipline during World War II, which was central to the work I led on “architecture in uniform”. This condition cannot be thought of without navigating constantly between the macroscopic scale of large buildings – figureheads of the “foremanship” that Bataille indicted – and state policies on the one hand, and on the other, the singular destinies of all those who were engaged in designing them or in designing minimal dwellings.88 Whatever their monumental or territorial scope, these buildings and the people who designed and inhabit them will therefore be central to my lectures.89

Figure 12

Figure 12

Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet, Maison de Verre, Paris, 1932: a 2014 view on the living room and glass wall.

Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen

  

Notes

1 “Collège de France, bâtiment des amphithéâtres”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, November 1939, pp. 50-51.

2 See the collected essays by Peter Galison and Emily Thompson in The Architecture of Science, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999.

3 Paul Turner’s book is still an essential reference on this theme: Paul Venable Turner, Campus. An American Planning Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1984.

4 Georges Gusdorf, L’Université en question, Paris, Payot, coll. “Études et documents”, 1964, p. 8.

5 Caroline van Eck has studied transfers from natural sciences in Organicism in Nineteenth-Century Architecture: An inquiry into its theoretical and philosophical background, Amsterdam, Architectura & Natura Press, 1994.

6 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990, p. 33.

7 The first publication on this subject was H.W. Kroto, J.R. Heath, S.C. O’Brien, R.F. Curl and R.E. Smalley, “C60: Buckminsterfullerene”, Nature, vol. 318, no. 6042, November 1985, pp. 162-163, DOI: 10.1038/318162a0.

8 Roland Recht, Leçon inaugurale faite le jeudi 11 mars 2002, Paris, Collège de France, 2002, p. 30; L’Objet de l’histoire de l’art, (new ed.) Collège de France/Fayard, coll. “Leçons inaugurales”, 2003, p. 53.

9 Charles Blanc, Grammar of Painting and Engraving [1873], Whitefish, Montana, Kessinger Publishing, 2010.

10 Paul Léon, La Renaissance des ruines, Paris, H. Laurens, 1918.

11 André Michel, Histoire de l’art : depuis les premiers temps chrétiens jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, Armand Colin, 1905-1929.

12 André Chastel, Le Grand Atelier d’Italie (1460-1500), Paris, Gallimard, 1965.

13 Korkut E. Erdur, Albert Gabriel (1883-1972) : architecte, archéologue, artiste, voyageur, Istanbul, Yapı Kredi Yayınları Publishers, 2006.

14 Guillaume Le Blanc and Jean Terrel, Foucault au Collège de France : un itinéraire, Bordeaux, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2003.

15 Christian de Portzamparc, Architecture : figures du monde, figures du temps, Paris, Collège de France/Fayard, coll. “Leçons inaugurales”, 2006.

16 On the policies implemented at the time, see Éric Lengereau, L’État et l’Architecture. 1958-1981. Une politique publique ?, Paris, Comité d’histoire du ministère de la culture, Picard, 2001.

17 Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search, New York, Praeger, 1960.

18 Jean-Louis Violeau described this process in “Artists and Architects in May 68: An Aesthetics of Disappearance” in J. Jackson, A.L. Milne, J.S. Williams (dir.), May 68. Rethinking France’s Last Revolution, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 263-278. See also his Les Architectes et Mai 68, Paris, Éditions Recherche, 2005.

19 Philippe Boudon, Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited [1969], Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1972; id., Introduction à l’architecturologie, Paris, Dunod, coll. “Sciences de la conception”, 1992.

20 Jean-Louis Cohen, La Coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophilie, Brussels, Mardaga, 2015 (revised ed. of the 1984 edition).

21 I will simply quote Christian Devillers, Le Creusot : naissance et développement d’une ville industrielle, 1782-1914, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, coll. “Milieux”, 1981. Vincent Barré, Patrick Berger et al., Panauti, une ville au Népal, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1981.

22 José Rafael Moneo, La solitudine degli edifici e altri scritti, Turin, Umberto Allemandi, 2004. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Monacelli Press, 1997.

23 Jean-Louis Cohen, “Hands that see: the CNAM lectures (1958-71)”, in Catherine Dumont d’Ayot & Bruno Reichlin (eds), Jean Prouvé. The Poetics of the Technical Object, Weyl/ Rhein, Vitra Design Museum, 2005, pp. 50-55.

24 They were following in the footsteps of Bernard Huet, whose trajectory Juliette Pommier has discussed in her doctoral thesis, Vers une architecture urbaine. La trajectoire de Bernard Huet, Université Paris 8, 2010.

25 Françoise Choay, L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités; une anthologie, Paris, Seuil, 1965.

26 Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935 [1967], New York, George Braziller, 1970.

27 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/. Toward a History of Painting [1972], Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002; Skyline: The Narcissistic City [1997], Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002.

28 Tafuri’s original discourse is included in his first book translated into French, which, unfortunately, is even more obscure than its initial version: Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture [1968], New York, Harper & Row, 1981.

29 Manfredo Tafuri, interview with Richard Ingersoll, “Manfredo Tafuri’s Historical Project”, Casabella, nos. 619-620, 1995, p. 98.

30 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” [1984], Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1986, p. 22.

31 Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces [1973], Amherst, New York, Humanity Books, 1984.

32 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text [1973], New York, Hill and Wang, 1975.

33 Jean-Louis Cohen, La Coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophilie, op. cit.

34 Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity [1990], New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.

35 Ibid., p. 28.

36 Christian Freigang, “Sources et prémices de l’édifice théorique”, in Joseph Abram, Jean-Louis Cohen & Guy Lambert (eds), Encyclopédie Perret, Paris, Monum, Éditions du Patrimoine, Institut français d’architecture, Le Moniteur, 2002, pp. 156-159.

37 Bruno Reichlin, “Maison du peuple at Clichy, a masterpiece of ‘synthetic’ functionalism?”, Daidalos, no. 18, December 1985, pp. 88-99.

38 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete [1928], Los Angeles, Getty Center for The History of Art, 1995, p. 150.

39 Ibid., p. 152.

40 Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Construire en fer : histoire et esthétique [1906], Gollion, Infolio, 2005.

41 This broader field is the topic of my book L’Architecture au xxe siècle en France ; modernité et continuité, Paris, Hazan, 2014.

42 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922, New York, W.W. Norton & Co, 1932.

43 For a classic reference, see Arthur Drexler (ed.), The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, London, Secker & Warburg, 1977. On the Beaux-Arts’ method of composing, see Jean-Pierre Epron, Comprendre l’éclectisme, Paris, Norma, 1997.

44 Jean-Louis Cohen, “Le culture della modernizzazione: il balletto delle egemonie”, in Maria Luisa Scalvini & Fabio Mangone (eds), Immagini e temi, thematical volume of the Dizionario dell’architettura del XX secolo, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 2004, pp. 21-31; and “Modernité et internationalisation”, Revue de l’art, no. 186, 2014, pp. 37-43.

45 Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth (eds), Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds”, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999.

46 Niklas Maak, Der Architekt am Strand. Le Corbusier und das Geheimnis der Seeschnecke, Munich, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2010.

47 Alain Guiheux and Olivier Cinqualbre (eds), Tony Garnier, l’œuvre complète, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 1990.

48 Frantz Jourdain, “Dédicace”, in L’Atelier Chantorel, Paris, G. Charpentier and E. Fasquelle, 1893. See also Jean-Louis Cohen, “L’Atelier Chantorel de Frantz Jourdain : l’architecte comme romancier et protagoniste”, in Emmanuel Rubio et Yannis Tsiomis (eds), L’Architecte à la plume, Paris, Éditions de La Villette, 2019, pp. 13-33.

49 Martin Heidegger, “Bauen, wohnen, denken”, in Otto Bartning (ed.), Mensch und Raum, Darmstädter Gespräch, Darmstadt, Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1952, pp. 72-88.

50 Bruno Zevi, “Concerning architectural culture”, Metron, nos. 31-32, 1949, p. 11 [from the original English text. JLC].

51 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre, Paris, G. Charpentier & Cie, 1886, pp. 176-177.

52 Paul Valéry, “Paradox on the Architect”, Collected Works of Paul Valery, vol. 4, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 178-87. See also Monique Parent, “Paul Valéry et l’architecture : les paradoxes d’Eupalinos”, in Madeleine Bertaud (ed.), Architectes et architecture dans la littérature française, Boulogne, Association pour la diffusion de la recherche littéraire, 1999.

53 Luc Fraisse, “Émile Mâle et le secret perdu de la Recherche”, in Sjef Houppermans et al., Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2009, pp. 9-34.

54 Marcel Proust, Letter to Jean de Gaigneron, August 1919, quoted by Jean Rousset, Forme et signification. Essai sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel, Paris, José Corti, 1966, p. 137.

55 On Mies van der Rohe’s readings, see Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word. Mies Van Der Rohe on the Building Art [1986], Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991.

56 Georges Bataille, “Architecture”, Documents, no. 2, March 1929, p. 117, in Hollier, Against Architecture, op. cit., p. ix.

57 Adolf Loos, “Architektur” [1910], in Trotzdem: 1900-1930, Innsbruck, Brenner, 1931, p. 107.

58 Walter Prigge (ed.), Ernst Neufert: normierte Baukultur im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt-am-Main, Campus-Verlag, 1999.

59 Umberto Eco, foreword to Vittorio Gregotti, Le Territoire de l’architecture [1966], Paris, L’Équerre, 1982, p. 8.

60 The proceedings of the symposium L’Architecte à la plume, organized in May 2010 by Paris Nanterre University and the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris La Villette, have brought many elements to these reflections. See Rubio, Tsiomis, op. cit.

61 Fernand Pouillon, Mémoires d’un architecte, Paris, Seuil, 1968. Paul Andreu, Enfin : roman, Paris, Gallimard, 2014.

62 Georges Candilis, Bâtir la vie, Paris, Stock, 1977; Pierre Dufau, Un architecte qui voulait être architecte, Paris, Londres, 1989; Marcel Lods, Le Métier d’architecte : entretiens avec Hervé Le Boterf, Paris, France-Empire, 1976; Pierre Vago, Une vie intense, Bruxelles, Archives d’architecture moderne, 2000.

63 Jean-Louis Cohen, introduction to Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture [1923], Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2007, pp. 5-82.

64 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas and Sze Tsung Leong, Great Leap Forward, Cologne, Taschen, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Design School, 2001.

65 Paul Valéry, “Two Virtues of a Book”, The Living Age, 1 February 1928, pp. 262-64.

66 “Architecture”, Genesis, no. 14, 2000.

67 Bruno Reichlin, Dalla “soluzione elegante” all’ “edificio aperto”, scritti attorno ad alcune opere di Le Corbusier, Mendrisio, Mendrisio Academy Press, 2013.

68 Bruno Reichlin, “Una sfida al sistema architettonico della tradizione. Il padiglione Church a Ville d’Avray”, ibid., pp. 207-233.

69 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City [1966], Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1982.

70 Vittorio Gregotti, Le Territoire de l’architecture [1966], op. cit.

71 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

72 Rafael Moneo, “On Typology”, Oppositions, no. 13, 1978, pp. 23-45. Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology”, Oppositions, no. 7, 1976, pp. 1-4.

73 It is always useful to refer in this respect to Massimo Cacciari’s anthology, Metropolis: Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel, Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1973.

74 Hubert Damisch, Skyline. The Narcissistic City, op. cit., pp. 12-15.

75 Louis Bonnier, Les Règlements de voirie, Paris, Charles Schmid, 1903.

76 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice [1909], New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

77 Bernard Huet, “La città come spazio abitabile, alternative alla Carta di Atene”, Lotus, no. 41, 1984, pp. 6-17.

78 [Translator’s note: in French, these housing estates are called “grands ensembles” which literally translates to “large sets”.]

79 Jean-Luc Godard, scenario of Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1967, in Marie Cardinal, Cet été-là, Paris, Julliard, 1967, p. 169.

80 Gaston Bardet, Le Nouvel urbanisme, Paris, Vincent & Fréal, 1948. On this controversial figure, see my essay “Le ‘nouvel urbanisme’ de Gaston Bardet”, Le Visiteur, no. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 134-147.

81 Pierre Lavedan, Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme ?, Paris, H. Laurens, 1926, pp. 6-7.

82 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, New York, Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 495.

83 Marc Augé, “L’architecture globale”, Le Monde, October 18-19, 2009.

84 Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building. The Power of Enigma, New York, Rizzoli, 2005.

85 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre, op. cit.

86 Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present. Inventing Architectural Modernism, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2008.

87 Siegfried Kracauer, History. The Last Things before the Last [1969], Princeton, New Jersy, Markus Wiener Publishers, 2013.

88 Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform. Designing and Building for the Second World War, Paris, Hazan, 2011.

89 Audio and video recordings of lectures are available on https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/jean-louis-cohen/_course.htm

Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1
Légende Albert and Jacques Guilbert, physics and chemistry building for the Collège de France, 1925-1938, sectional view of the lecture halls.
Crédits Source: L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, November 1939, p. 51.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 129k
Titre Figure 2
Légende Erich Mendelsohn, laboratory for Albert Einstein, Potsdam, 1921, general view in 2010.
Crédits Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 620k
Titre Figure 3
Légende Fullerene C60, or buckyball.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 187k
Titre Figure 4
Légende Jean Prouvé delivering a lecture at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, around 1967.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 580k
Titre Figure 5
Légende Eugène Beaudouin, Marcel Lods, Vladimir Bodiansky and Jean Prouvé, Maison du peuple, Clichy, 1939 (general view).
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 524k
Titre Figure 6
Légende Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Eisenbauten, 1908. The cover shows Félix Dutert and Victor Contamin’s 1889 Galerie des machines.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 264k
Titre Figure 7
Légende Frantz Jourdain, funereal monument for Émile Zola, Montmartre cemetery, 1902.
Crédits Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,8M
Titre Figure 8
Légende John Ruskin, detail of the western façade of the Amiens Cathedral, watercolour, 1856. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 140k
Titre Figure 9
Légende Raymond Unwin, village square, illustration from Town Planning in Practice, 1909.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 252k
Titre Figure 10
Légende Gaston Bardet, The city, a cluster rather than a target, illustration from Pierre sur pierre, 1946.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 956k
Titre Figure 11
Légende Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), “De Rotterdam” building seen from the northern bank of the Maas, Rotterdam, 2014.
Crédits Photograph: Jean-Louis Cohen.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 144k
Titre Figure 12
Légende Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet, Maison de Verre, Paris, 1932: a 2014 view on the living room and glass wall.
URL http://books.openedition.org/cdf/docannexe/image/9512/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 154k

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