1. “Rehabilitation des Logements des Annees 60s,”
Le Moniteur Architecture (May 1997), 56-77.
In 1990, architects Claude Bernard and Paurd Tautel redesigned the façade of a housing project known as Barre Robespierre, or simply, as Les 4000s in the low-income banlieue known as La Courneuve (Figure 1). The architects added loggias and pathways of circulation on the 130-meter long and 15-story high façade. By introducing rhythm—repetition with variation—they created visual complexity on a façade previously characterized by repetition. They also created spatial complexity by thickening the façade—breaking the two-dimensional surface by introducing protruding elements into the third dimension. Though it is easy to dismiss this project as a quick and unsustainable fix, I believe their critique is important not just on a formal level, but also within the context of the foregoing discussion of social space.Le Moniteur Architecture (May 1997), 56-77.
In this chapter, I trace Architecture’s response to the challenge of social housing in the banlieue from 1989 to 2009. Through a close reading of projects featured in AMC Le Moniteur Architecture, France’s first and most prominent monthly architectural journal, I critique newly-built, low-cost housing, as well as architectural interventions in existing projects by using the sociological framework developed in Chapter 3. While it is unfortunate that architects and builders have classified this kind of architecture as “the social-housing type” of building, and by doing so have limited the scope of their interventions, there are several positive examples that indicate an evolution in the design of social housing. My intention is to identify what works well and to suggest starting points for improvement. The most successful new projects have not been those that merely attempt to house the poor in spaces of order and clarity—spaces that strip the inhabitant of agency and identity—but those that produce what I call “noise” in their design. I define noise as visual ambiguity and spatial complexity as illustrated in the Barre Robespierre project above. I will develop this concept with examples and argue that it gives power and agency to the inhabitant.
The second part of this Chapter addresses the question of urbanism. Paris can revitalize its existing urban space by designing for a diverse population, and to facilitate access to the center of the city. Instead of attempting to subvert Michel de Certeau’s “local authorities,” urban design must engage them in dialogue. While I advocate for a comprehensive plan that acknowledges social and historical context, I caution against a plan that is too specific.
Architects have talked about the continuum between architecture and urbanism. This has led to centralized projects that attempt to impose a singular vision over multiple scales. An example of this is the town project for Boulogne-Billancourt which was featured in the December 2004 issue of AMC (Figure 2). Three architects (Francois Grether, Mathieu Reynaud and Patrick Chavannes) were chosen to implement a 482-million-euro redesign of 10% of the banlieue, including 5800 housing units, 215 square meters of office space, a cité des arts, a cité scientifique and a cité internationale. This project represents a microcosm of the larger urban schemes that were discussed in 2007 as part of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Grand Pari(s) competition for the urban rethinking of the greater Paris region. Through an analysis of entries from the competition—many of which problematically collapsed architecture and urbanism—I argue that a new, isotropic urban plan must remove barriers, facilitating mobility and access for everyone. It must not attempt to regiment everything but instead leave some variables undefined. This will create conditions for community involvement in the urban environment and the creation of a context in which the architecture of “noise” is successful.
Noise
It is interesting to compare the concept of noise with Michel de Certeau’s analysis of movement in the built environment. De Certeau compares the movement of individuals through a dense city to the act of speech.[1] Varied spaces and numerous pathways are like words and the act of walking—or choosing which of many paths (or words) to take—is a form of self-expression and self-actualization:
[T]hey are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.[2]
De Certeau celebrates the dense grid of New York and its ability to create a complex vocabulary of spaces and circulation over time. On the other hand, he regards a space that is too rational or rigidly designed as fascistic because it provides a very limited vocabulary and stifles expression. Since the 19th century, the open spaces of the low-income banlieue have been too open, and the forms of the towers within them too simple. There is no ambiguity and no visual or spatial complexity. The banlieue is oppressive because it limits the kind of expression that de Certeau describes. A denser, more complex urbanism and architecture can provide a richer spatial experience. It is therefore important to introduce the possibilities of noise and ambiguity to an otherwise highly rational architecture.
Various projects have done this with varying success. In 1993, Georges Loiseau and Christine Dugontier added rounded balconies to an otherwise standard social housing project in Creteil (Figure 3). The curve successfully introduces visual rhythm to the façade by softening the repetition of right angles. The balcony thickens the façade and provides a buffer between the private interior and the exterior space. While the flat façade would have permitted surveillance of the inhabitants’ activities, the balcony allows the inhabitant to watch whoever is outside. In doing so the architecture reverses the direction of watching and gives power to the inhabitant. It shades the apartment from the sun and the gaze of the surveying eye of external authority.
The same ideas regarding noise and ambiguity can be transposed onto a discussion of other kinds of architectural interventions. For example, visual and spatial complexity in plan and section also facilitates the kind of free circulation that de Certeau described. The social housing project in Montreuil-sous-Bois shown in Figure 4, for example, results in a varied spatial experience because each unit is slightly offset from the regulating grid. Multiple entrances and possible pathways traverse the building, creating moments of discovery and surprise, which provide inhabitants agency to experience the space on their own terms. This project, however, runs the risk of looking like a monument. As I will discuss later, some of the worst social housing projects were monuments—either sculptural in nature or monuments to the technological and industrial prowess of France.
Even though Franck Hammoutene’s project is located inside Paris, I include it here because it illustrates another kind of noise: that of a heterogeneous program (Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8). It combines commercial areas with housing, and by doing so, introduces complexity of movement and spatial experience, as evidenced by the ground-floor plan in Figure 7. The vertical windows produce rhythm on the façade, making it difficult to read the interior of the building from outside. However, from the inside, the smaller windows form a unified, coherent view of the outside, which in turn gives power to the inhabitant (Figure 8).
Jean Guervilly and Francois Mauffret’s project (also located inside Paris) is interesting because of its treatment of the inner courtyard (Figures 9 and 10). Traditionally, the courtyard is a space of vulnerability because it typically facilitates surveillance. By reducing its size, converting it to an L-shape, and introducing density in the form of a garden and walkways, Guervilly and Mauffret’s design makes the space feel more intimate and less formidable. These interventions in plan and section, however, seem like a natural reaction to the density of an urban setting like Paris: they may have had to make the courtyard small simply because there was a lack of space. This idea of an intimate courtyard is challenged in the vast space of the banlieue where countless housing towers with vast courtyards already exist.
Phenomenal Transparency and the Thickened Façade
To determine how architecture can address the challenge of the banlieue, I would like to bring the discussion back to the façade. Because social housing projects are usually mass-produced and/or prefabricated, it is difficult to introduce variation and complexity in the plan and section. Architects therefore focus on the design of the façade to ameliorate uniformity and give buildings character. Therefore, when we rethink architecture’s response to social housing in the Paris banlieue, the façade is the single most important element that must be addressed.
I have already stated that thickening the façade with the use of balconies, loggias, walkways or stairwells is beneficial because it introduces visual and spatial complexity. It also introduces an implication of spatial depth as described by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s discussion of phenomenal transparency. In their study of the façade of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein, they note that it is composed of advancing and receding vertical planes. They call this effect phenomenal transparency because the planes suggest the existence of an interior space without giving it away completely:
Each of these planes is incomplete in itself or perhaps even fragmentary; yet it is with these parallel planes as points of reference that the façade is organized, and the implication of all is of a vertical, layerlike stratification of the interior space of the building, a succession of laterally extended spaces traveling one behind the other.[3]
What makes this kind of “transparency” relevant is that the façade of Villa Stein is actually opaque. It therefore has the ability to distort the image of the interior space, and to ensure privacy while projecting a distorted image to whoever is watching from outside. Indeed, as Rowe and Slutzky describe, the interior space of the villa is “almost flat contradiction of the façade.”[4]
Dominique Montassut and Bernard Trilles’s 1989 project in Fresnes, a southern banlieue, introduces a second vertical plane on the façade in the form of horizontal balustrades running along the building (Figure 11). This creates a slice of social space: a protective buffer between the interior and the vast and undefined exterior space. When an inhabitant of this building enters the balcony, he or she is in a space that is neither completely private nor completely exposed. They are in a liminal space and have the ability to interact with others on their own terms. That is what makes the narrow slice of balcony a social space. The horizontal bands also counter the verticality of the building. The building seems to be hugging the ground, reasserting its connection to the land it occupies. In doing so, it confirms the inhabitants’ place on French land.
Another way to thicken the façade and introduce a slice of social space within it is exemplified by Herzog and DeMeuron’s “Moving Building” in Switzerland (Figures 12 and 13). The primary façade of this building is oriented towards a narrow alley and a wall. The housing units are meant to be approached from the side, and noise introduced by the off-set columns creates varying levels of complexity and implies a second plane.
The thickened façade also occurs to an extent in Henri Ciriani’s HLM housing in Paris (1991, Figures 14 and 15). This building is not as successful, however, because each individual balcony is closed off into a unit almost like an enclosed room. The architect prevents the occupants from communicating with each other. By doing so, he turns the balcony into a private space rather than a social space, which limits the opportunity for community-building. The balcony therefore fails to act as an intermediary between the interior/private and exterior/public.
Philippe Alluin and Jean-Paul Mauduit’s social housing in Paris (1991, Figure 16) is also problematic, even though it thickens the façade to create balcony space. Here, the balconies are closed off from the exterior by shutters. Again, the space is caged and hidden—almost apologetic. It is therefore an ineffective buffer between the architecture’s interior and the urban space outside. The flattened façade created by the uniform shutters is contradictory: it exposes the inhabitants’ activities while trying to conceal them.
A concerted effort to transform some architecture in the Saint-Saens neighborhood of Montreynaud, a banlieue of Saint-Etienne, started in 1979 but came to an abrupt halt in 1981 when the government administration changed. The architects, Christian Devillers and Alexandre Chemetoff, began a process to define public spaces and construct some “diversified” buildings to increase urban density. Figure 17 shows that their “repairs” to existing buildings involve the introduction of noise on the facade. This introduces the kind of complexity that ties together the architecture and the urban environment of the banlieue. Conversely, Figure 18 shows a typical commercial building designed by Jean Francois and Patrice Dekomink that does little to ameliorate the situation of vast undefined spaces dotted with monolithic housing blocks. It offers neither shade in the form of an overhang nor any kind of sidewalk. There is only the private interior and the exposed exterior, which closes off interaction.
Later, around the turn of the century, we begin to see projects like Michel Kagan’s Logements PLI (Figure 19 and 20) and Radu Molnar and Pascal Piccinato’s Logements Sociaux (Figure 21). These projects reflect a trend of design evolution because they successfully exhibit a considered use of the thickened façade. The images show not just the ambiguity of surface and space on the façade when viewed from the outside, but also the slice of social space, the buffer between exterior and interior that sits within the façade itself. The thickened façade of Edouard Francois’s 2004 building in Paris (Figure 22 and 23), however, takes this concept to an extreme, and turns the building into a monument.
Breaking the Façade to Facilitate Circulation
Thus far, I have proposed different ways of introducing visual or spatial complexity on the surface of the building in order to make its reading more complex. In addition to this, the façade can also be manipulated to facilitate physical movement through space: circulation. This is important in terms of urban planning because the façade is where the building meets the urban space around it. While architects often don’t have control over a building’s surroundings, they can obstruct or facilitate free movement through and around a building. As I have explained previously, Michel de Certeau would consider a varied and free movement in urban space a form of expression and an articulation of the inhabitants’ freedom and agency.[5]
In the last twenty years, several buildings have sought to mediate movement not just within their interiors but also in the environment they are situated in. Catherine Furet’s Zac de l'Orme in La Courneuve (Figures 24, 25 and 26) restricts freedom of movement. It has two small entrances punctuating a large, flat façade that follows the curve of the street. A narrow walkway (Figure 25) runs in front of the building along the street, reiterating this border between outside and inside. The walkway is too narrow to serve as social space: it is instead linear and cages inhabitants in. This reinforces the coercive nature of the building’s circulation scheme. However, the building does provide some opportunities for social space in the form of smaller courtyards, as seen in the plan in Figure 26.
Working on a similar low-cost project in 1991, Renzo Piano designed a building using the typical scheme for social housing—a rectangular plan with large courtyard in the center (Figure 27). In contrast with the Furet building, however, Piano used two simple techniques to facilitate movement and agency. He opened the extruded rectangle at four points—literally breaking the façade to allow various ways to enter, exit, or simply pass through the building. He also defined the spaces of the courtyard by putting trees and pathways for circulation. This transformed the inhabitant from an observed object in space to a subject free to exercise agency in determining what path to take. The trees obscure vision and lend privacy to the courtyard. The 1997 plan for Diener & Diener’s 37 Logements (Figure 28) shows a similar breaking up of the façade to facilitate free movement through an otherwise typical low-cost building, which represents an evolution in the discipline based on Piano’s ideas. The concept of free movement within and around a building is central to giving people agency.
It is relevant here to reintroduce Barre Robespierre, the project with which I began this chapter. Figures 29-35 show the original building and drawings describing how a repetitive façade can be transformed into a façade of rhythm. The circulation is literally superimposed onto the front of the building, allowing the residents alternative pathways of movement inside the building. The façade thereby becomes an inhabited social space. Inhabitants gain access to new views of the bottom and sides of the building and also of the building itself, which confers power and subjecthood to the inhabitants.
Other examples of social housing architecture where architects used circulation to undermine the façade and facilitate a multiplicity of movement through urban space begin to define an evolution of this idea. These projects include Francois Deslaugiers’s treatment of the courtyard at the Cités Barbusse et de la Motte in Aubervilliers (1997, Figure 36), Jean-Philippe Loupac and Nicole Roux-Loupiac’s transformation of several single units in students’ housing into doubles with bathrooms (1997, Figure 37), and K-Architectures’s Logements Sociaux, where one project was broken into three buildings and three small courtyards (2007, Figure).
Privacy and Power
Like circulation, the ability to see connotes a position of power. Inhabitants of social housing are vulnerable when they are being watched. Conversely, they are powerful when they have privacy and the ability to observe. I discussed in Chapter 3, for example, why it was important in La Haine that inhabitants be banned from entering the roof of their own homes. The roof is a place of agency and power just like the open and surrounded courtyard is a space of vulnerability. The 1989 AMC announced the demolition of a 1300-unit British housing project which was now considered “unacceptable” (Figure 40). In the short announcement, the editors of the AMC seemed puzzled: “Was it aesthetically displeasing? Was it the influence of Prince Charles? Who knows?”[6] In the figure, a lone figure walks across a large courtyard surrounded by a façade of repeating geometric shapes. I posit that the project was considered unacceptable because its very design threatened its inhabitants.
In 1990, the AMC celebrated Henri Ciriani’s design for a housing tower. Ciriani’s drawing depicts a tower that ameliorates the effects of surveillance and vulnerability. It does this by breaking up the monolithic block into fragments. He introduced the curved element that acts as a thickened façade and mediates vision. The design is thoughtful in that it does not appear to be monumental. In contrast to Jean Welz’s tower (Figure 42) it seems to be a comfortable place to live in.
The police officers’ housing designed by Christian Hauvette (Figures 43 and 44) in 1995 is highly symbolic because it is located right on the Peripherique Ring Road that separates the city of Paris from the banlieue outside it. Unsurprisingly, it has all the elements of an architecture that confers power on its inhabitants: a façade of visual noise and social space, multiple routes of vertical and horizontal circulation, a tastefully non-monumental form, and a rhythmic variation in plan and section. While Gaelle Paneau’s 2003 project (Figure 46) does this as well, by providing multiple spaces to look out from, two other projects from 2004 and 2005 do not. The first is Daniel Kahane’s Logements (Figure 47) that attempts to provide privacy by building in shutters that can open or close. Because these shutters are visible on the façade, however, it is impossible for inhabitants to choose privacy without exposing the fact that they are concealing something. The mechanism turns the building into even more of a monument or piece of art installation and by doing so transforms its inhabitants into objects rather than subjects with agency. Du Besset-Lyon’s 71 Logements in Montpellier (Figure 48) pose the same challenge. The 2005 example is Jean Harari, Aline Harari and Jean Poisson’s 88 Logements Sociaux in Saint Denis (Figure 49). It is a classic example of poorly designed social housing: flat façade with repetition, open central courtyard with one entrance, and limited circulation through a stairwell open to public viewing.
Rhythm in Mass-Produced Housing
Often in the design and construction of social housing the priority is to lower costs and increase the number of housing units. Some may argue that, because this kind of housing tends to be mass-produced and/or prefabricated, it is impossible to introduce noise in the form of spatial and visual complexity. I counter that assertion by pointing to simple design techniques that introduce a level of complexity within the constraints mentioned above. One such technique is that of rhythm as a substitute for repetition. An excellent example of this is Herzog and de Meuron’s Immeuble Shwitter in Basel Switzerland (Figures 50-51). Though it is prefabricated, its repeated elements skip a window here and a balcony there, producing a harmonious composition of visual rhythm. The architects have introduced visual and spatial complexity in a building that obviously relies on low-cost repeating units. This is evident in the fairly constant plans and sections in Figure 51.
Kirkor Kalayciyan and Jose Oubrerie’s Immeuble de Logements also exhibits a certain rhythm, but one which is static and monotone (Figure 52). This is because it is an obvious repetition of a single, small composition. In its relentless machine-like production of pattern, it actually reiterates the flatness and banality of the façade. A similar example of repetition in mass-production, where, with a little more initiative rhythm may have been introduced, is illustrated in a plan by Marcel Lods (Figure 53). This plan appears in an article celebrating the architect who along with Eugéne Beaudouin designed the Cité de la Muette at Drancy, a project I have discussed in Chapter 2. To be fair, the plan has 4 repeating units and 1 smaller unit; but this rhythm does not register in any way on the façade. Finally, Figure 54 shows a 2003 example of a project in Courbevoie that makes good use of rhythm to introduce complexity.
Housing as Monument
It is important to recognize that some design decisions I identify as successful in projects from the last 20 years can go awry if not implemented with thoughtful consideration of social and urban context. For example, in order to introduce complexity or create better living spaces, architects have often built monuments as housing. Whatever the intention, I posit that housing—especially low-cost housing—as monument is a bad idea. The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture describes the word “monument” as a “building or memorial intended to perpetuate the memory of an event or an individual, such as a public memorial or funerary monument.” It is interesting to note the connotation of death inherent in the creation of monument. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable describes a monument as being “recorded from Middle English, and originally denoted a burial place rather than the statue or building over it or commemorating a person or event; the word comes via French from Latin monumentum, from monere ‘remind.’” The public housing monument thus becomes a place where those refused access to the city go to die. It commemorates France’s ability to efficiently house and domesticate its working class. Two kinds of monuments have emerged over the last twenty years and during the 20th century in general: one is optically monumental or sculptural, and the other is a monument to modern production techniques and their ability to provide mass housing.
The following examples (Figures 55-60) illustrate these two kinds of monuments and their failures. Georges Maurios’s Le Montorgue (Figure 55) and Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro’s Saint-Martin III are overdesigned to the point that they become gaudy sculptures meant to be seen and not inhabited. This transforms their inhabitants from subjects with agency into objects that are to be observed. Figure 57 shows Paris’s 13th arrondisement (or neighborhood) where social housing towers emerged in a kind of urban setting similar to the banlieue. In a way, its urban density depicts a terminal condition for the Paris banlieue that is not as dense today. The towers of the 13th arrondisement, however, are still geometrical objects scattered in open space. There is no coherence in the urban fabric and this makes each object monumental and isolated.
The second kind of monument pays tribute to the technological advances that enable the construction of mass-produced housing. Figure 58 shows one of countless housing projects being demolished because it had too many units to actually be an inhabitable place. Figure 59 shows the construction images from Marcel Lods projects. It is interesting to note that these projects are often described in the language of building materials and techniques and in terms of numbers: number of units, dimensions, etc. We rarely hear about the quality of space or the experience of movement within the building. Figure 60 shows Jakob+MacFarlane’s 100 Logements. While they have created an interesting and varied spatial experience, the project is obviously very monumental.
Pedagogical Spaces
Another trend is the ambivalent approach to social housing of the banlieue since 1989. This is evident in the way social housing has been presented in AMC. In the 1989 yearly review of buildings in France, social housing projects were placed in a category called “Habitat” along with single family homes and private apartments. In December 1992, the “Social” category was added to the contents page alongside the “Habitat” category. Public projects such as community centers, old age homes, and schools were grouped together in the “social” category. In the mid-1990s, both these categories disappeared and projects were not really grouped together at all. In December 2000, a new category called “logements” appeared, under which social housing projects were organized. In 2002, the “logements” category was joined by one old and one new category: “social” and “maisons.” The latter separated single-family homes from apartments. In December 2004 and December 2005, all such categories disappeared and a new system of organization took their place. It was called the “Panorama des régions” and it grouped social housing of the banlieue together with all other architecture in the Île-de-France region. Over all these years, however, one thing remained constant: social housing projects appeared in close proximity to projects for old age homes, nurseries, sanatoriums and schools. Often the language used to describe these is very similar. It has connotations of pedagogy, condescension, and domestication. A project from the 2008 issue of AMC even groups together student housing with low-cost workers’ housing (Figure 61).
It is interesting then to look at educational spaces that break free of the condescending model of pedagogy and explore ways to give agency to the participants. By re-conceiving spaces of learning as spaces of exploration, play, and freedom, architects have lent subjectivity to the “learners” and allowed them to learn according to their own terms. Henri Ciriani, an architect have criticized in this paper, designed an excellent school building in 1989 (Figures 62-63). This building is not about domesticating students but allowing them to learn on their own terms. The building’s plan (Figure 63) tilts the regulating grid and, by doing so, introduces noise in the form of spatial and visual complexity. The building rejects the primacy of the façade and its shifting planes are reminiscent of the phenomenal transparency evident in Le Corbusier’s work.
Isabelle Biro and Fabienne Gerin-Jean’s Residence Personnes Agées (old age home, Figure 64) is built for surveillance and caretaking. It’s large, unrelenting windows afford the inhabitants no privacy. They are the objects of the care that this institution has to offer them. It processes these objects with efficiency as if it were a machine. Atelier Seraji’s Logements Etudiants (students’ housing, Figure 65), however, is architecture that allows the creation of social space, mainly because of its protruding balconies and rhythmic facades.
Curves Obscure Vision
While a circular building is odd and monument-like, it is important to note that curves undermine the primacy of vision. They obscure the image and by doing so add to it the noise of spatial and visual complexity. Curves can also provide optical variation even if all the elements are merely repetitive. This is seen in Figures 66-68 in the northern banlieue of Gennevilliers: as the building curves away its features appear to foreshorten in a non-uniform way that is different from the regular foreshortening seen in a flat slab façade. In fact, Figure 68 shows how two parallel curving buildings create a dense, street-like condition with a finite horizon, a dense and enclosed urban space. This is taken to an extreme in the banlieue of Chanteloup-les-Vignes, where the object-like quality of the social housing stands out in sharp contrast to the single-family homes (Figure 69), underscoring the sharp divide between the poor and the rich.
In 1965, architect Michel Holley published an article in a planning magazine explaining his “theory of high density.” His writing was accompanied by two diagrams (Figure 70 and 71) which explained how he had “succeeded in modeling the problem of volume and surface.” Figure 70 is an “Urbannigramme” showing how the dense geometric building creates multiple opportunities of movement and vision. I posit that this only works in a dense urban context and not in a banlieue with vast open spaces. Oscar Niemeyer’s Complex Residential Copan in Sao Paolo (Figures 72-73) is an example of a good housing tower, but it only works because it sits within the dense urban fabric of Sao Paolo. The surrounding buildings obscure the monolithic nature of the building and provide a complex and interesting visual landscape to see from within.
Architectural Density Versus Urban Density
I have already talked about the importance of introducing spatial and visual complexity in plan and section. This is the kind of architectural density that Nicolas Soulier’s Cité Michelet (Figure 74) and Patrick Chavannes’s Îlot Deslandes (Figure 75) embody. By introducing a varied rhythm of large and small spaces in the building, they create an interesting spatial experience for the inhabitant. This density creates the possibility for social space—as Henri Lefebvre describes it—to occur within the space of the architecture: “itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur…social space implies a great diversity.”[7] As I discussed in Chapter 3, however, the places of social space are nebulous and they may occupy both architectural and urban space. If a similar density does not occur outside the space of the building, then social space disperses. Lefebvre discussed the need for a close-knit fabric of space both in architecture and in urbanism:
The more or less accentuated split between what is known as “architecture” and what is known as “urbanism” – that is to say, between the “micro” and “macro” levels… has not resulted in an increased diversity. On the contrary, it is obvious, sad to say, that repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short, that products have vanquished works. Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures.[8]
Figure 76 shows the 13th arrondisement of Paris. In aerial views, the space of the neighborhood appears to be densely knit together. One might conclude from this image that if the banlieue was allowed to develop as it has so far, it will eventually be dense enough to facilitate the occurrence of social space that it currently lacks. Aerial views, however, are insufficient and often misleading because they flatten a lot of information. If we were to go to street-level, or enter a housing unit, we would realize that this space still has wide open, undefined space dotted with monolithic towers. It is important to introduce density, open circulation, and spaces of power in the city as well as its architecture. The view in Figure 77 shows the same neighborhood but this time it is possible to see how this still feels like a place of surveillance and vulnerability. In contrast to this neighborhood, Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, a banlieue of Tours, has a highly dense urban fabric (Figure 78). In an article called “Densifying rather than extending,” the May 1993 edition of AMC celebrates this small town of 18,000 people where the mayor refused to allow any high-rise buildings to be constructed. Consequently, the space of the town allows for more privacy. While the regimentation of space denotes objecthood, the space of Saint-Pierre-des-Corps recognizes its inhabitants as subjects. Rather than letting the monumental building mark their existence, or poverty, they become the owners of the building.
In a similar way, when Herzog and de Meuron designed the 200 Logements in Vienna, they densified the urban plan instead of designing a densely packed tower with a wide open courtyard (Figures 79-80). Their project is composed of several different kinds of low-cost houses tastefully arranged within a framework of curved streets. These houses exhibit several features of good low-cost housing that I have already described: a thickened façade that creates noise in the form of visual and spatial complexity, the introduction of the curve while maintaining a non-monumental design, and spaces of privacy. The urban arrangement of the houses provides a complex vocabulary of circulation and many opportunities for the creation of social space. Emmanuel Combarel and Dominique Marrec’s Residence Sociale in Paris also mediates urban density and circulation by stacking the housing on top of the “public space” which would normally have been a central courtyard. No matter how closely architecture and urban design might be related, however, their scales are vastly different and it is important to treat them as two different disciplines that complement one another. It is for this reason that I want to look more broadly at the most recent event in the urban planning of the greater Paris region, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Grand Pari(s) competition.
[1] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93.
[2] de Certeau, 93.
[3] Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta, Vol. 8 (1963), 50.
[4] Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta, Vol. 8 (1963), 50.
[5] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93.
[6] British Social Housing with 1300 units demolished, Le Moniteur Architecture (December 1989), 32.
[7] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 73.
[8] Lefebvre, 75.
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