aa files 6 3 - Columbia University

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Pier Vittorio Aureli 3
Architecture for Barbarians
Adrian Forty & Thomas Weaver 19 In Conversation with John Winter
Niall Hobhouse32The Suburbanist
Pamela Johnston 36 A Theatre of Insects
Alessandra Ponte 46 Journey to the North of Quebec
Caroline Evans 56 The Ontology of the Fashion Model
Ashley Paine 70 The Problem of Stripes
Inderbir Singh Riar & Mark Lyon 74 Ideal Plans and Planning for Ideas
Steven Spier 87 On Gillespie, Kidd & Coia
Mark Crinson 90 Austerity and Architectural Derangement
Victoria Watson 97 The Locus Inside
Timothy Brittain-Catlin 100 On Margate Sands
Tao Zhu 104 Building Big, with no Regret
Laurent Stalder 111 In Conversation with Mario Botta
Thomas Weaver 118 GOD & CO
120Contributors
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Ideal Plans and
Planning for Ideas
Toulouse-Le Mirail
Inderbir Singh Riar
with photographs by Mark Lyon
Candilis-Josic-Woods, competition model,
Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1962
© Shadrach Woods Archive, Avery Library,
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Designed by the avant-garde architects Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic
and Shadrach Woods in the early 1960s and built over the subsequent decade-and-a-half, Toulouse-Le Mirail is among the most
renowned and controversial efforts to create at once a modern urban
utopia. Le Mirail was the result of an ambitious and massive national
programme to build new cities throughout France starting in the
mid 1950s. These villes nouvelles were imagined by politicians, planners and the public as emblems of the rapid modernisation and consequent prosperity of French society.
At the same time Le Mirail was deliberately conceived as a challenge both to the received edicts of functionalist town planning as
codified by the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (ciam)
and to the prevailing technocratic mentality of the French planning
establishment. Candilis and Woods in particular would draw upon
their involvement in Team 10, a group of young architects that by the
early 1950s aimed to reform ciam notions of the ‘functional city’ with
an alternate experience of ‘community’. Core members of Team 10
attempted to design for ‘growth and change’; they were especially
sensitive to discovering in everyday life the nuances of social ‘identity’ that could be approximated in new architectures. Rather than proceed from a priori types, then, Candilis-Josic-Woods would design Le
Mirail as an infrastructure that could facilitate spontaneous community formation as well as provide a legible architectural ‘fix’. The
result was the equally celebrated and maligned rue dalle, a continuous elevated pedestrian platform into which housing blocks and
ancillary services attached (seemingly at random) and on which the
social life of the new city was to take place.
The statist enterprise behind the villes nouvelles sought to prefigure oases of modernity. These new towns would correspond to a
notion of the ideal modern French citizenry, whose outlook was to
be shaped by its persistent modernisation and consequent prosperity. In fact, the villes nouvelles gave clear measure to les trentes glorieux, a period of unprecedented economic growth in France from
1945 to 1975. In this expansion, guided by successive five-year plans,
housing became a critical tool for resituating the social and technical norms of French life. These ambitions of the French state were
shared by Candilis, Josic and Woods, whose avant-garde temperament was marked by the modernist conviction that people could be
conditioned (and thus reformed or even rehabilitated) through
the planning of space. Yet the architects’ desire for ‘open’ design,
for a kind of planned randomness, by way of the dalle, was based on a
belief that architecture and society are constantly and necessarily in
flux. The contradiction between these two potentially (and likely
incommensurate) utopian enterprises may well have contributed to
the resulting and now widely-perceived malaise of the French cités.
Still, it was perhaps the deliberate remove of places like Le Mirail
from traditional centres of political and economic power – leading to
their maligning characterisation as banlieues, or postwar ‘suburbs’
built in proximity to historic city centres but largely existing apart
from their social and economic life – that actually enabled the utopian experiments. Given their isolation, the novel forms and configurations of the villes nouvelles were supposed by technocrats and
architects alike to produce almost spontaneously an entirely new
society. This wilful social engineering would, however, soon be challenged: the substantial demographic shifts following decolonisation could only upset the preconceived balance of the banlieues, leaving many towns, Le Mirail included, as enclaves of immigrants and
often the poor.
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Nevertheless, Le Mirail remains, at least in architecture culture,
a singular instance to re-imagine the social, technical and spatial
demands for designing a city as a whole. What has changed over time
– indeed, what may well have already begun to change during the
height of realising the villes nouvelles – is the degree to which urbanism is still held to be a genuinely modernist enterprise, one still able
to signify both the status of the individual and the totality of experiences in the public realm.
Le Corbusier, it seemed, was entirely to blame.
In November 2005, France appeared overcome, shocked but
seemingly incapable of stemming increasingly ferocious riots
exploding throughout its many banlieues. Triggered by the death of
two teenagers (one Malian-French, the other Tunisian-French), electrocuted while hiding in a power sub-station after thinking they were
being pursued by police in Clichy-sur-Bois, a grand ensemble outside
Paris, a wave of nationwide upheavals gave expression to simmering
but long-standing feelings of disenfranchisement among the often
poor or immigrant residents of these satellite communities. Footage
of nightly confrontations between youths and police, of bricks and
bottles and baton charges, flashed across television screens worldwide. A state of emergency would be declared on 8 November, eleven
days after the first outburst. Another ten days passed until violence
abated. Meanwhile, the French parliament approved a three-month
extension of emergency laws allowing local authorities to impose curfews, conduct house-to-house searches and ban public gatherings.
Apart from the Parisian banlieues, the heaviest rioting occurred
in the cités of Toulouse. In Le Mirail, seething resentments were
waiting to boil over. Le Mirail had previously experienced riots, notably in 1998, after a teenager was killed by the police. In nightly images of street fighting in 2005, large, elongated apartment blocks
appear ghostly in the background. Lit eerily by the glow of police
flares and burning cars, little distinguished them as products of
avant-garde design, appearing simply on the nightly news as any
other collections of concrete towers suddenly made evident throughout the cities of France.
Yet, well before the haze of tear gas and Molotov cocktail cleared,
questions of public security were tied to the actual design of the banlieues. Commentators, academics, politicians, activists, citizens
and, naturally, architects immediately inveighed against the cités,
condemning their plans – typically upheld as dispiriting collections
of housing blocks – for fostering social alienation. The correspondent for Bloomberg could only put it thus, when titling his dispatch
describing events on Saturday, 19 November 2005: ‘Le Corbusier
Helped Set the Stage for French Riots: Architect Championed Lowcost Concrete Towers and the Social Engineering that Went with
Them’. ‘In Paris, the monstrous scale of the suburban estates and
their isolation at the ends of the Metro lines has rendered them
no-go areas and anti-societies’, the reporter noted. ‘They are too
often just lodgements, not communities of any kind.’1 This was followed by the coup de grace: ‘The riots, of course, have other complex
problems behind them, principally that of isolating immigrant populations and failing to give them adequate employment. But the evil
genius of Le Corbusier lurked for far too long in the corridors of
architectural schools throughout the world.’ The New York Times
similarly concluded: ‘Le Corbusier… inspired many of the suburbs
where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired
the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of
out… Le Corbusier called houses ‘‘machines for living’’. France’s
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housing projects, as we now know, became machines for aliena- prominent results was Carrières Centrales, a development initiated
tion.’2 These were common refrains. The apparent failure of the ban- in 1952. To the resulting mat of courtyard housing, all based on an 8
lieues – despite their vastly different scales and locations and not- by 8m grid set by Ecochard, Candilis and Woods would contribute
withstanding the changing political circumstances behind their their Nid d’Abeilles and the Semiramis housing blocks. These ‘mulplanning – was given common cause, originating in the apparently ti-storeyed collectives’ were, the two architects insisted, based on
corrupting ideologies of pre-war avant-gardism. The legacy of the careful study of traditional buildings and their use. Animated by
riots, aside from directly or indirectly helping Nicolas Sarkozy voids created by alternating enclosed balconies (in effect, courtascend to the presidency, was that modern architecture was sudden- yards), the parti of the two blocks was informed by a clever adaptaly made protagonist in debates on the future of France.
tion of the Unité model to Islamic conventions of privacy.
These Moroccan works quickly became instrumental in shaping
Maybe, though, there was something to the charges of 2005. Even
if Le Corbusier was really a straw man, there grew an inescapable a growing challenge to the perceived orthodoxies of the modern
feeling that somehow the heroic plans of an earlier era remained movement. When ciam convened its ninth congress at Aix-enculpable. The pre-war dogma of the functionalist ordering of space – Provence in September 1953, it declared its programme to create
offering means not only to create cities but equally to re-engineer a ‘Charte d’Habitat’.3 With its Athens Charter, ciam had strictly dividsocial relations – appeared potently in the postwar architecture of ed cities into zones for Habitation, Work, Leisure and Circulation –
the banlieues, in clustering tower blocks or endlessly extending a doctrine for salubrity that responded to inherited fears of the overbarres, with their novel geometries and idealised (read: isolated) crowded nineteenth-century city. ‘Habitat’ was, however, altogether
siting. The programme of new towns was fixed to the rise of the wel- more ineffable, something that could be given little by way of a unifare state. Le Corbusier had unwittingly provided a powerful early versalising definition. Yet for a younger generation of ciam memsymbol for this expansion: his celebrated Unité d’Habitation, fin- bers, who would soon coalesce as Team 10, ‘habitat’ was broadly
associated with a more ‘humane’
ished in Marseilles in 1952. While
approach to modern architecintimately tied to Le Corbusier’s
ture.4 Accordingly, when presentown theories of creating a veritaing the Nid d’Abeilles and Semirble ‘social condenser’, in which a
amis blocks at Aix, Candilis
fraternal order was imagined ariscaused a sensation with a grille
ing within a single structure, the
(the ciam graphic standard for
Unité nevertheless granted a
comparing projects according to
ready model for emulation – and
the four points of The Athens
thus for mass application. HousCharter) juxtaposing the Carrières
ing would be a key tool for modCentrales housing with photoernising the postwar république.
graphs of everyday life in a bidonThe Corbusian legacy had a
ville. By valorising street life and
further twist. Candilis, Josic and
folk art, which were accompanied
Woods had been disciples of Le
by detailed demographic statisCorbusier – Candilis and Woods
tics, the resulting quasi-anthromet while supervising the conpological study indicated just
struction of the Unité. Candilis,
how social habits, as well as builda Greek by origin, first encountered Le Corbusier at the seminal 1933 ciam meeting, which result- ing techniques, were thought to inform new attitudes towards
ed in The Athens Charter, the famed document of functionalist town design. As such, the rubric of ‘habitat’ came to provide a way for
planning. In 1945 Candilis joined Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier; Woods architects to begin balancing the quotidian and the modern, craft
arrived three years later, after having read literature and philosophy and technology, indigenous groups and ‘advanced’ civilisation. More
at Trinity College Dublin, on the g i Bill and, prior to the Second than anything, the medium of this equilibration – between local culWorld War, studying engineering in New York. After completing the ture and universal civilisation – was to be the dwelling unit itself.
With this renewed emphasis on the habitable, the housing quesUnité, Candilis and Woods decamped to North Africa. There they
worked in Morocco for atbat-Afrique, a branch of Atelier des bâtis- tion, which had fundamentally shaped ciam, was given new currenseurs, the multidisciplinary group originally convened by Le Corbus- cy. Following Aix, the emergent Team 10 would seek to replace the
ier to produce the Unité construction documents. Upon returning ‘functional city’ with an alternate experience of ‘community’. Core
to France in 1954, Candilis would meet Josic, then with the Paris members, including Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck and
atbat office. With Woods’s arrival in 1955, the three architects Candilis and Woods, attempted to design for what they called
‘growth and change’. Building on van Eyck’s aphorism, ‘a house is a
would open an office in the French capital.
In Morocco, Candilis and Woods had joined efforts to replace city and a city is a house’, Team 10 aimed to discover in practices of
growing bidonvilles, or squatter settlements, around Casablanca. everyday life, as found in indigenous settings or in existing western
Under Michel Ecochard, the director of the Service de l’Urbanisme cityscapes, the nuances of social ‘identity’ that could allow designing
outward from the domestic to the urban
of the French protectorate of Morocco, innoCandilis-Josic-Woods,
realm and back again.
vative plans were prepared for resettling
Carrières Centrales housing, Casablanca, 1953
This concern, to see the design of a housindigenous Muslim populations arriving en
© Shadrach Woods Archive, Avery Library,
ing unit as a work of urbanism, would
masse from native villages. Among the most
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increasingly preoccupy Candilis and Woods upon their return to spatial relations remaining in constant flux. Candilis-Josic-Woods
France. Together with Alexis Josic, the architects immediately won thus sought a minimum system that could be realised gradually and
first prize in Opération Million, a national housing competition at every stage of growth, but leaving maximum possibilities for adaporganised by the French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in tation.10 The stem accordingly offered a ‘linear organisation (a line
1955. Opération Million followed the initiation in 1952 of the second has neither shape nor size)’ with which ‘to distribute ancillary servicnational five-year Plan for postwar development.5 As part of its man- es throughout that domain of housing’ as well as ‘to bring together
date, the Plan demanded the reduction in price of a typical two-bed- as many activities as possible’.11 In a remarkable corresponding colroom apartment, a need tied to presumed rising personal prosperity lage, the architects animated this abstract ‘line’ with scenes culled
and growing industrial capacity. As such, Opération Million specifi- from everyday life. Images of people walking, sitting, running, playcally called for generic designs. Candilis-Josic-Woods accordingly ing and marching feed into a meandering central spine; cars are
developed a prototypical apartment type. The unit was to fulfil simul- positioned only at distant extensions; around them float the broader
taneous demands for achieving an economy of means and econo- scales of towns, fields and marketplaces. The incipient privileging of
mies of scale (through new techniques of prefabrication). Yet it was walking over driving was ‘a way toward the realisation of a collectivity’
the sheer reproducibility of Opération Million – of which Candilis- as much as ‘the identification of the individual’.12 By actualising what
Josic-Woods would realise countless schemes – that indicated just Walter Benjamin had once hailed as the pedestrian’s ‘serpentine
how the ambitions of postwar French planification and aménagement gait’, the metabolic sense of strolling in the hustle-bustle of the typidu territoire were to be mapped on architectural experiment and vice cal city, the stem offered counter argument to the received formalism
versa.6 To establish the social and technical grounds for mass hous- of the plan masse (dismissed by Woods for its ‘fixed, immobile, static
ing was to be immersed in a statist project of modernisation, one form’ and insensitivity to ‘environment or activity’). The goal was,
that would take the city as an exclusive site for experimentation.
above all, to envision how new towns could be implemented – and
When Candilis-Josic-Woods published a
then come to life – over time. The spatial and
survey of their work in 1968, just one year
temporal open-endedness afforded by the
before dissolving their office, an introductory
stem as a strategy for urbanism would hew
essay identified the exact moment when the
closely to increasingly grandiose initiatives
tone and ambition of their thinking changed
for a new generation of villes nouvelles. The
decisively. ‘Two phases can be distinguished
stem, as idée fixe, came to inform precisely
in the partnership’s development’, explained
how Candilis-Josic-Woods tackled their next
Jürgen Joedicke, the book’s editor: ‘the first,
and perhaps most significant work – the new
in which town-planning was approached as
town of Toulouse-Le Mirail.
Le Mirail resulted from a Concours
an exercise in visual aesthetics; and the secNational d’Urbanisme organised in 1961 by
ond in which Candilis-Josic-Woods turned
Louis Bazerque, the legendary socialist mayor
away from this attitude in pursuit of new sysof Toulouse. Elected in 1958, Bazerque immetems and forms uninhibited by the bonds of
diately set upon a programme of modernising
architectural composition.’ With their rationhis native city. Toulouse, with a population of
al layouts, the Opération Million works largely
270,000, was the somewhat sleepy ancient
owed to conventional late-ciam thinking.
capital of the Languedoc; Bazerque hoped it
Woods had, however, tired of the ‘static, prewould become a centre of economic and
cise and fixed’ limits of ‘composition’.7 He
especially opposed the typical French practice of the plan masse, industrial power in France. His timing was right. Le Mirail was desigwhich depended on defining outlines of buildings and their disposi- nated the very first Zone à Urbaniser en Priorité, or zup, in France.
tion in space. Originally preoccupied by planning for an ideal sub- Established in 1960, the zup was an administrative formula that set
ject – really, a family unit, whether extrapolated from the Maghreb or priorities for government financing and execution of urban infrapostwar France – Candilis-Josic-Woods began to look more broadly structure, as well as for the selection of sites.13 zups were built by a
at ‘society’, which they saw as ‘an unhierarchical association of local authority and a private developer, with top priority for national
autonomous individuals, with change providing the only constant grants and loans. The Le Mirail competition called for the design
element’.8 This intellectual shift would mark their growing and of an entirely new city for 100,000 people to be set on 2,000 acres of
visionary efforts at city planning. The question became, then, how largely agricultural land laying five miles southwest of old Toulouse.
to establish change and a-composition as a ‘constant’?
The site was chosen because of its proximity to two industrial zones:
Woods offered one answer in his influential ‘Stem’ concept of aviation to the northwest and chemicals to the southwest. Candilis1960. It indicated a crucial theoretical departure. For Woods, emerg- Josic-Woods were awarded the competition first prize on 31 January
ing as a key polemicist in Team 10, ‘urban design’ could be guided by 1962. Construction began two years later.
‘a basic structure’ that included ‘all the servants of dwelling, all the
The first phase of Le Mirail, and the only part ever realised, was
prolongements du logis: commercial, cultural, educational and leisure divided into three districts, each named after nearby historic castles:
activities, as well as roads, footpaths and services’.9 Moreover, these Bellefontaine to the south, Reynerie in the middle and Mirail to the
conditions would ‘vary from one place to
north. Three types of housing were providCandilis-Josic-Woods,
another and from year to year’. The very posed: winding high-rise barres, four-storey
Opération Million, 1955
sibility of the future city was here assumed
walk-up apartments and single-family ‘patio
© Shadrach Woods Archive, Avery Library,
open-ended, with any number of social or
villas’ grouped in a pinwheel formation.
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Mark Lyon, Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2008– 09
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Only Bellefontaine closely achieved the architects’ intentions (the
apartments in Reynerie and Mirail finally designed by the Association Paritaire d’Architectes, or apa, who based their layouts on the
Candilis-Josic-Woods plans). Le Mirail was to include schools,
green spaces, administrative facilities and cultural institutions
such as libraries and sports halls – all aspects of what the French
Ministry of Construction had, in 1959, identified as the necessary
équipement of the villes nouvelles.14 Bellefontaine provided a cultural
complex containing a swimming pool, a gymnasium and a youth
centre; Reynerie abutted a man-made lake flanked by an enormous
park; Mirail eventually hosted a new liberal arts campus for Toulouse University as well as a school of architecture (the former manifesting Candilis, Josic and Woods’s preoccupation with ‘mat’ buildings; the latter reflecting Candilis’s interest by the early 1970s in
prefabricated modular components). The heart of the new city was
to be a regional administrative complex. ‘Just as in Toulouse’, Candilis-Josic-Woods declared, ‘the centre of gravity of the urban structure is the Capitole, in our solution, the structure’ – the Le Mirail
stem – ‘ends at the commercial and administrative centre’.15 The
centre was never executed.
Candilis-Josic-Woods deployed the stem as the organising principle for all of Le Mirail. ‘Our solution’, the architects declared during the competition, with not undue emphasis, ‘is primarily to create a permanent urban structure… this structure becomes
the generator of order, of specific character and of the
life of the city’.16 Bellefontaine, Reynerie and Mirail were thus
connected by the dalle, a continuous ‘linear street’ offering ‘a zone
of highly concentrated activities and density of collective life’; it
would be a ‘domain of the pedestrian freed from the bondage of the
automobile’, thereby ‘giving the ‘‘street’’ a new prestige – the street
regarded as the primordial function in urban life’.17 As built, the
dalle was enormous: a winding, open platform raised 4m above
ground, with nurseries and kindergartens and shops scattered atop
it and long housing blocks of 5, 9 or 13 storeys linking to its continuous pedestrian scape. With cars arriving only at the perimeter of
housing blocks or heading directly to parking underneath the dalle,
a resident simply never had to cross the road to engage the new city.
With this kind of experiential as well as ‘structural’ valence, the
stem was a way by which things – buildings, parks, civic life – could
be made intelligible. The actual geometry of the Mirail plan, an endlessly additive hexagonal pattern with both dalle and housing
blocks winding at 60 or 120 degrees, was thus assigned a unique
degree of agency. It ‘will react to the conditions which it creates’,
Woods insisted, ‘and, in a continuous feed-back process it will, ideally, change constantly’.18 On the one hand, the deliberately twisted
‘line’ of the stem challenged modernist conventions of organising
space, notably the four watertight functions enshrined in The Athens
Charter. Zoning, as a planning technique, was to be eschewed for
‘an approach which, being more synthetic, more organic, more
reactive, would also be more real’.19 On the other hand, the very idea
of providing a priori patterns seemed to contradict the heuristic procedures that would give life to the stem-as-city. Despite its naturalistic veneer, the rationalising demand of the stem-cum-dalle (that is,
how to locate things, if not people, in space) suggested limits to the
vision of self-organised planning unfolding at Le Mirail.
In its utterly novel spatial arrangements, the dalle represented
precisely the kind of modernity nascent in the zups. This followed
not only from architectural belief, but responded to technocratic
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ambition. While building the very first zup, Toulouse suddenly
became a métropole d’équilibre – a designation established by the
fifth national Plan of 1965, which intended to decentralise key propulsive industries away from the Paris agglomeration. A new development agency, the Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à
l’Action Régionale (datar, placed directly under the Prime Minister), identified eight urban centres as focal points.20 With its history
of aviation, Toulouse was made the hub of aerospace as well as electronics. (Indeed, Candilis-Josic-Woods would prepare a schematic
design for a Motorola factory near Le Mirail.) In short, Toulouse was
now rendered a technopolis, with the concurrent construction of
Le Mirail a critical symbol of its modernisation (not least owing, of
course, to its mass prefabrication). Thus in 1969 could setomip
(Société d’Equipement de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, the public–private agency under which Le Mirail was developed), in a brochure
publicising ‘Un Quartier Neuf pour Toulouse’, juxtapose a finished
portion of housing in Bellefontaine with a Concorde supersonic jet
under assembly.21 As modern as the Concorde, then, the consequent image of psycho-social rejuvenation atop the Le Mirail dalle
made manifest this spirit of unfettered progress and prosperity.
Hence Woods’s demand to supersede the limits of ‘zoning’: by way
of its stem, Le Mirail was to engender a decidedly late-modern form
of life, one in which cultural, economic, political and, indeed, architectural values were seen not as sets of differentiated interests but
rather as intertwined processes to be forever modified (‘feedback’
in Woods’s parlance) as new needs (for the public ‘good’) arose.
The dream was short-lived. Ten years after the start of construction Candilis could merely reflect that Le Mirail was successively
undermined by the domination of private interests over public
needs. Only the first ‘operations’ in Bellefontaine ‘were of a social
character’; succeeding phases, in which public non-profit organisations yielded to ‘private initiative’ that ‘gradually monopolised construction’, were resulting in ‘impoverishing construction’.22 The
result was ‘conflict’ between ‘the meaning of the plan and of private
interests’.23 In Candilis’s view, only the superior credit of the state
could make viable the zup; the very meaning of Le Mirail was thus to
be understood as a social project, not an economic undertaking.
Here, again, lay a tension inherent in the stem as generator of urban
form: while it was assumed to enable the ongoing ‘open’ building of
the city, the reality was that any continuity could only come from
lasting political will and, of course, funding.
The national Plans were inevitably contested along ideological
lines as they materialised locally. In Toulouse, this would put a
Socialist mayoralty and Gaullist centre at loggerheads. As early as
1965, political conflict led to accusations of Gaullist efforts to
undermine Bazerque’s project by siphoning funds for social housing.24 Importantly, by the early 1970s, the Right could blame Bazerque of having focused exclusively on Le Mirail, now beset by financial mismanagement, and consequently call for greater private
development – a move resulting in the restoration of the single-family house as the preferred type for the city’s population.25 Pierre
Baudis, an independent republican who defeated Bazerque as
mayor in 1970, would thus encourage the building of individual
homes by private companies just as work on Reynerie commenced.26
Here, a divisively cultural charge was levelled squarely at the massification represented by Le Mirail. The flipside of les trentes glorieux
was simply the emergence of the individual as the sovereign unit of
social power and arbiter of popular taste.
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Candilis-Josic-Woods, Stem collage, 1961
© Shadrach Woods Archive, Avery Library,
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The long-term goals imagined by Candilis-Josic-Woods were
predicated on the autonomous growth of Le Mirail, as if the stem
had enough capacity to ensure its perpetuation. For Woods, the
viability of this vision was undermined by ‘bureaucratic sloth and
political timidity’, which only perpetuated the bugbear of zoning.
He reflected, with venom:
One is obliged to conclude that Le Mirail, for all its image impact,
cannot conceivably live up to the hopes which it generated at its inception… It retains some architectural qualities which distinguish it from
other, more desolate, housing projects in France, but will remain an
urbanistic failure unless the rules can be changed, specifically the zoning
rules which were imposed upon it and which segregate rather than integrate the uses in what would otherwise be an admirable vocabulary.27
Le Mirail was, then, symptomatic (and maybe doubly so, as the
very first zup) of urbanistic trends in France. While Le Mirail had
once stood to epitomise the French postwar modernisation, by the
early 1970s, at the moment of contraction of les trentes glorieux,
observers could only notice that the villes nouvelles were simply relegated to the periphery of historic urban centres, with little uniting
them. Woods saw this clearly:
The situation is aggravated by a total lack of transportation planning and policy: virtually all displacement within the site and between
the new and old quarters of Toulouse, must depend on the private motor
car, to the joy of Renault and the despair of the inhabitants who are thus
literally forced into the ‘société bureaucratique à consummation
dirigée’ as Henri Lefebvre describes it.28
Woods may well have conceded that the ‘road’ had exercised its
revenge on the ‘street’ (he had earlier concluded that the street had
been ‘destroyed by the combined assaults of the automobile and the
Charte d’Athènes’29). This was further suggested by a 1972 census
taken in Le Mirail that counted 20,916 inhabitants, out of which 52
per cent worked in the centre of Toulouse, while 17 per cent worked
in other suburbs and 8 per cent beyond the city’s limits.30 Yet, Le
Mirail was linked to the city centre only by a single road and bus connections were infrequent.31 The city was, basically, a hamlet but with
a perverse reversal – despite its constricted access, it experienced a
daily exodus to seek economic life elsewhere, an aller-retour entirely
dependent on ‘the joy of Renault’.
Woods’s evocation of ‘controlled consumption’ was not only a
philosophical indictment – it captured perfectly the situation of Le
Mirail as it underwent the ‘battle of the supermarkets’. Impressed
by the new shopping centres being constructed in Germany and
Switzerland in the mid 1960s, Louis Bazerque insisted that one be
provided in Le Mirail.32 The winning tender, placed by the Société
Epargne chain store conglomerate, resulted in a massive (17,000
square metre) Géant supermarket erected on land originally set
aside for the unbuilt regional administrative centre.33 The site rested on the upper ridge of the embankment that was to separate the
two phases of the original masterplan. With the second phase eliminated, the supermarket remained isolated at the edge of Le Mirail,
floating in a sea of parking and forever untied to the dalle. Bazerque
was unabashed:
When the Géant opened, the shopkeepers in Bellefontaine were in
despair. But three months later, they were already much happier. People
go to the Géant for bulk shopping, but it takes a long time. So if you just
want one or two things, you go to the shopping centre [on the dalle].34
Yet as a 1971 bbc documentary noticed, ‘the Géant is half a mile
from the Bellefontaine flats, or’, as the narrator emphasised sotto
84
54528_AA_Final.indd 84
voce, ‘a ten minute push’ – a relation exposed in footage of empty
shopping carts abandoned on the vacant coursives (the ‘streets in
the air’ that provided access to the housing blocks). Candilis could
only comment:
Well, what could we do? It’s idle to think that we could have stopped
it. So, you adapt. The town isn’t something fixed, a monument – it’s
organic, constantly changing, constantly alive.35
The bbc could, however, observe that by the early 1970s the
setomip decision to welcome Géant had resulted in shops closing
on the dalle. Moreover, the spurned bidders sought revenge: in 1972,
both a Carrefour supermarket (one even bigger than Géant) and the
Horizon 2000 shopping centre went up just beyond the boundary of
Le Mirail. Both were positioned along the autoroute outside the zup.
Consumer traffic was now irreversibly directed around or away from
Le Mirail by the one aspect of modernity that Candilis-Josic-Woods
had deliberately sought to eclipse: the motorcar.
Ultimately, the stem-as-street could actualise only the internal
world of Le Mirail and not its connections to a broader urban scape.
Nonetheless, there was some proof of a stimulating localised public
life. In 1972, a visiting journalist from the Washington Post remarked:
‘The Bellefontaine dalle was filled with people. Shoppers streamed
in and out of the cluster of stores at the beginning of the dalle… Children played in a variety of ways all over the different levels of the dalle
and the adjacent park areas and groups of both children and adults
came together here and there for a game of marbles or a chat’.36
It was surely the impression Candilis-Josic-Woods had wished to
impart. This kind of irrational, ludic sensibility of children as activating agents of city life was upheld by Team 10 as a crucial countermeasure to the rationalist ethos of ciam.37 Still, the almost naive
appropriation of the child’s view could hardly fulfil the greater
demands of providing a more dynamic and varied social scape. As
the Washington Post correspondent duly noted, there was little to do
for a large segment of the population:
The universe of Le Mirail seemed a bit limited and sterile for adventurous teenagers and young adults who tire of athletic and cultural
diversions. There is presently no night life, no places to ‘hang around’ in
Le Mirail and the bus to downtown Toulouse does not yet run often at
night. It is not surprising that Remy [Mylene Remy, a French writer]
picked up reports of teenage vandalism and rowdyism, even in so small a
population. Movie houses, cafés, teen centres, theatres and hotels are
supposed to locate in the regional centre, which would be easy enough
for everyone in Le Mirail to reach, even on foot. But these facilities
require private capital and private developers have been slow to come to
Le Mirail because it is lagging behind schedule overall.38
Notwithstanding the eventual elimination of the regional centre,
it was clear that the dalle (and, by extension Le Mirail) was still empty.
As much as parental surveillance of the dalle made sense for young
children, it may well have made insecure other residents who could
only wish for a modicum of privacy or, indeed, anonymity.
When the bbc looked at Le Mirail in 1971, it otherwise noted
despairingly the prevailing state of the postwar villes nouvelles
throughout France. ‘As in most French towns’, the voiceover
explained, Toulouse ‘has exploded beyond its boundaries into an
anarchic and haphazard desert of flatland’ – a description accompanied by panoramic views of anonymous tower blocks, their repetitive
siting symptomatic of the plan masse techniques held dear by French
planners. The bbc had originally assumed Le Mirail as antithesis of
typical grands ensembles; this was, really, due to its architectural
aa files 63
05/11/2011 15:10
merit. Still, just as the plan of Le Mirail was never completely realised
(at least not according to the architects’ intentions), so the social,
cultural and economic ambitions for the city (as laid down by the
State) would slowly degrade.
The change would begin in the late 1980s. It started, by many
accounts, with the forcible relocation of the poor – often immigrants, sometimes sans papiers – by housing authorities capitalising
on the ready availability of habitations à loyer modéré (hlm), or statesubsidised rent-controlled housing; the progressive middle classes
– teachers, journalists, architects – were increasingly seen leaving en
masse. As a journalist who once lived in Le Mirail and covered the
Toulouse crime beat for Le Figaro put it recently, the zup was
‘designed in an era when everyone thought that the middle class – a
white middle class – would always work. It started as a city for people
who wanted to become rich; it will end as a city of the poor’.39 The
resulting socio-economic decline – today fully one-third of Mirailiens are unemployed – is inversely related to increasing cultural
diversity, with over 90 nationalities represented in the city. The latter ethnographic evidence is, however, anecdotal; under the strict
edict of républicanisme, France bars defining its citizens by race.
(The French census thus cannot account for ethnic origin.) Officially, then, it would be impossible to know how many people in Le
Mirail are, say, Maghrebian, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, subSaharan African, Chechen, Sri Lankan or, indeed, so-called native
French. Yet tensions between banlieue and métropole are commonly
described not only in terms of class but of race, each condition
invariably connoting the other in mainstream perceptions of the
cités after November 2005.
Like so many postwar villes nouvelles, Le Mirail has, decidedly in
keeping with French sensibilities, been given a new acronym – zus,
or Zone Urbaine Sensible. In 2003, under the Ministère de la Ville,
the Observatoire national des zones urbaines sensibles (onzus) was
convened ‘to measure the evolution of social inequalities and uneven development between quartiers en difficulté and their agglomeration’.40 The earliest ambition was to make sure that territories
labelled as zup would not be seen as ‘autonomous entities’, set apart
from their cities and the nation.41 The hopes of 2004 could only be
brought into sharp relief by the upheavals of 2005, the unifying ideal
of France splintering among its countless charged banlieues.
Whether originally zup or now zus, the bureaucratic undertaking
(and appellation) signifies just how much the French city continues
to be a site of analysis and intervention. Today Le Mirail is part of the
largest Grand Projet de Ville (gpv) in France, a massive national initiative to improve the social, economic and urban scape of the many
cités throughout the country.42 With €435 million dedicated to Bellefontaine and Reynerie, the goal is nothing less than the complete
urban redevelopment of the city: new civic and cultural institutions
to be created; parklands and roads to be added or improved; social
housing units to be renovated or rebuilt; and the ‘résidentialisation’
of existing blocks to be achieved by providing ‘zones of transition’
between ‘public and private’ that are otherwise ‘totally nonexistent’.43 Yet Toulouse city hall would concede that units inside the
‘large, winding housing blocks’ remain ‘a source of satisfaction for
the residents’; any feelings of spatial alienation were to be blamed
on the totalising nature of the entire ensemble – hence, today, the
complete demolition of the dalle, accompanied by opening a major
north–south pedestrian axis in Reynerie and, following the whole or
partial destruction of the ‘long monoliths’ (the winding apartment
aa files 63
54528_AA_Final.indd 85
complexes), an east–west corridor in Bellefontaine. Instead of the
universalising function of the dalle, Le Mirail now has smaller shopping centres that deliberately impart a ‘village’ atmosphere (grouped
as they are around Metro stations that finally arrived in 1993). Rather
than the béton brut or modular steel panels of the original équipement, these complexes are stucco with pitched roofs of clay tile,
an aesthetic evoking a Midi-Pyrénées vernacular, and against the
purposeful meander projected by Candilis-Josic-Woods are today
posed the logics of ‘sidewalks, pedestrian pathways, bike lanes and
roads’.44 Still, the programme of deconstruction and reconstruction
is by necessity piecemeal. Even as it may eventually eclipse the built
and totalising legacy of the zup, the gpv, however impressive, can
now only bring into relief the audacity of the original vision, a
remarkable expression of the possibility to create a city, and society,
ex nihilo.
No longer appearing raised on an artificial ground, the public life
of Le Mirail is, in the end, to descend to the traditional street – or,
really, to be introduced to a nostalgia for it, which until now never
existed. Yet the imposition of the ‘street’ and its assumed familiarity
carries darker overtones. As much as the gpv is undeniably tied to a
progressive social project, its ambition for urban renewal may well
reflect a more insidious purpose. As the journalist Hacène Belmessous reveals:
Around halfway through the 2000s, during hearings on the redevelopment of a quartier hlm in a city in the south of France, it was decided
to demolish one of the barres to make the whole ensemble more liveable. Yet a representative of the Ministry of the Interior, who sat at the
core of the commission, imposed his own final decision: this barre
wouldn’t be demolished, but another. Why? So tomorrow, in the renovated quarter, law enforcement could easily intervene against eventual
urban guerrillaism.45
A reawakened strategy of Haussmannian percements, the policing
of the banlieues is tied to their supposed amélioration. These are not
the traditional cities where barricades are erected across streets,
where pavés serve as ready munitions. The open plans of places like
Le Mirail, a shotgun marriage of ciam’s ‘four functions’ with Team
10’s ‘web’, enable a different choreography of street fighting – with
youths in 2005 using cell phones to attack spontaneously or to warn
of retaliation. As such, the French army has taken matters into its
own hands, having built mock cities, complete with typical hlm
barres, for training against ‘urban insurrection’.46 In this shift, calls
for law and order are replaced by demands of national security.47 It is
a fear heightened by views of the banlieues as homes of immigrants,
often Muslim, connected to global terror networks. If the avant-garde
architecture of the 1960s villes nouvelles was to enable the normalisation of a new French citizenry, then here, in its simulation for military training, it can only indicate the degree to which les cités remain
utterly exceptional in the French public mind. In the end, the banlieue may well reveal the extent to which France is at war with itself.
This research is part of a larger project carried out in
collaboration with the photographer Mark Lyon, and aims
at looking at ‘everyday life’ in Toulouse-Le Mirail through
photography, interview and archival research. Interviews
were conducted in French, taken in shorthand or
recorded digitally, then transcribed and translated.
Photographs were taken on a Leica 50mm slr.
85
05/11/2011 15:10
1. Colin Amery, ‘Le Corbusier helped
set the stage for French riots:
Architect championed low-cost
concrete towers and the social
engineering that went with them’,
Bloomberg, 19 November 2005. Amery
is former editor of The Architectural
Review and for 20 years the architecture
critic at the Financial Times.
2. Christopher Caldwell, ‘Revolting High
Rises’, The New York Times Magazine,
27 November 2005, p 29.
3. With the cessation of hostilities in
1945, and the return of exiled architects
to Europe, ciam re-initiated its
programme of international meetings.
4. Annie Pedret, ‘ciam ix: Discussing
the Charter of Habitat’, in Max
Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel,
(eds), Team 10, 1953–81: In Search of
a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam:
nai Publishers, 2005), pp 20–21.
5. This was commonly know as the second
Plan Monnet (named after Jean
Monnet, a businessman who had
joined Charles de Gaulle in exile during
the Second World War, and who was
subsequently appointed director of the
new Commissariat Général du Plan).
The first Plan, devoted almost
exclusively to industrial recovery (with
adequate investment capital secured in
part by Marshall Plan funds provided by
the United States), would yield the
European Coal and Steel Community,
the precursor to the European Union.
6. Over the course of their partnership
from 1955 to 1969 the architects
designed about 40,000 dwellings
throughout France, though not all of
these were Opération Million projects.
See Tom Avermaete, Another Modern:
The Postwar Architecture and Urbanism
of Candilis-Josic-Woods (Rotterdam:
nai Publishers, 2005), p 43.
7. Shadrach Woods, ‘Urban Environment:
The Search for System’, in John Donat
(ed), World Architecture 1
(London: Studio Vista, 1964), p 153.
8.Ibid.
9.Ibid.
10. Jürgen Joedicke, ‘Candilis-Josic-Woods:
Notes on the Origins and Planning
Methods of the Partnership’, in
Candilis-Josic-Woods: A Decade of
Architecture and Urban Design
(Stuttgart: Karl Krämer, 1968), p 9.
11. Shadrach Woods, ‘Stem’,
Architectural Design, May 1960, p 181.
12. ‘Stem’ collage, dr196, Shadrach Woods
Archive, Avery Architectural Prints
and Drawings, Columbia University.
13. The zup was superseded in the 1970s
by the zac, or Zone d’Aménagement
Concentré, which also functioned
by contract between a commissioning
local authority and private developers
contracted to build residential
or non residential projects on a
profitable basis.
14. In 1959 Pierre Sudreau, Commissioner
of Construction and Urbanism for the
Parisian Region, convened five working
groups to elaborate the future needs
of the grands ensembles. Out of these
meetings came the broad categories
of the grille d’équipement: educational,
cultural, and religious institutions;
commercial facilities; social and
sanitary institutions; green spaces and
sports; roads and public infrastructure;
and general institutions, such as
86
54528_AA_Final_amend.indd 86
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
municipal services and police. For an
explanation of the grille d’équipement
and its impact on the first zups,
including Le Mirail, see Urbanisme
75/76 (1962).
G Candilis, P Dony, A Josic, S Woods,
Competition Toulouse-Le Mirail (1961),
p 4; report submitted to the national
competition for the Le Mirail zup.
Ibid.
Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and
Shadrach Woods, Toulouse Le Mirail:
Birth of a New Town (Stuttgart:
Karl Krämer, 1975), p 19.
Shadrach Woods, ‘Le Mirail, A New
Quarter for the City of Toulouse’,
Washington University Law Review, 1965,
p 13. The influence of hexagonal plans
on Le Mirail is discussed by Roger
Sherwood, ‘Toulouse or Not Toulouse:
Le Mirail after 20 Years’, Modulus,
1980–81, pp 98–99.
Shadrach Woods, ‘Le Mirail, A New
Quarter for the City of Toulouse’, op cit,
pp 13–14.
James Rubenstein, The French
New Towns (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978),
pp 25–28; Norman Pressman and
Paul Brace, ‘Developing New Towns
in France’, Plan Canada, July 1973,
pp 28–29.
Société d’Equipement de Toulouse
Midi-Pyrénées, Une Pari Tenu:
Le Mirail, 13 December 1969.
George Candilis et al, Toulouse
Le Mirail, op cit, p 110.
Ibid.
Rosemary Wakeman, Modernising the
Provincial City: Toulouse 1945–1975
(Cambridge, ma: Harvard University
Press, 1997), pp 132–33.
Ibid, p 145.
Trevor Peters (dir), An Expanding
Town in France: Toulouse Le Mirail
(British Broadcasting Corporation,
1971), film, 16mm, 26 minutes.
Shadrach Woods, The Man in the Street:
A Polemic on Urbanism (London:
Penguin, 1975), p 168. Woods insisted
that the ‘stem’ principle ‘still may
be mined for ideas’ (p 170).
Ibid, p 168.
Architectural Design, May 1960, p 181.
For Woods, the only way the ‘street’
could be ‘revalidated’ was via the ‘stem’.
The census results are published in
Toulouse-Le Mirail, op cit, p 119. Further
data listed the population as:
0 to 10 years old
35%
12 to 20 years old
12%
21 to 40 years old
39%
41 to 60 years old
11%
above 60
3%
In other words, it was mainly young.
Of those that worked, 41% were labour
workers, 36% clerks and employees
and 9% managers and executives.
Rosemary Wakeman, op cit, p 129.
Ibid, 131ff.
Louise-Emmanuelle Friquart,
Les Quartiers de Toulouse: Le Mirail,
Le Projet de Candilis (Paris: Accord
Edition, 2006), p 44.
Trevor Peters, op cit.
Ibid.
Leonard Downie Jr, ‘Le Mirail: A Study
in Concrete’, March 1972, np; Downie,
the urban affairs correspondent for the
Washington Post, prepared his report
(one in a series on ‘new towns’ around
the world) for the Alicia Patterson Fund.
37. The descriptions of children’s play had
been important to the theories of Team
10, whether in the Smithsons’ ‘Urban
Re-Identification’ grid (presented at
the 1953 ciam conference and which
prominently featured the photographer
Nigel Henderson’s shots of children
in East London streets) or Aldo van
Eyck’s promotion of the experiential
perspective of the child in his
influential Amsterdam orphanage
completed in 1960 (to say nothing of
his remarkable playgrounds built in
the same city from the late 1940s to
the early 1950s). In their retrospective
account, Toulouse-Le Mirail, published
in 1975, Candilis-Josic-Woods would
make extensive use of images of
children at play.
38. Leonard Downie Jr, ‘Le Mirail’, op cit.
39. Philippe Motta, discussion with author
(Toulouse, March 2009).
40. Observatoire national des zones
urbanines sensibles, Rapport 2004
(Délégation interministérielle
à la ville, November 2004), p 7.
41. Ibid, p 8.
42. The Toulouse gpv, which comprises
three zus and totals €713 million,
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
is mainly funded by local and regional
governments, the French state, social
agencies and, to a lesser degree, the
European Union and private donations.
Grand Projet de Ville, Empalot, Bagatelle,
Mirail (Toulouse: Mairie de Toulouse,
October 2010), np.
Grand Projet de Ville, Empalot, Bagatelle,
Mirail (Toulouse: Mairie de Toulouse,
October 2010): n.p.
Hacène Belmessous quoted in
Sébastien Fontenelle, ‘Si Tu Veux La
Guerre, Prépare La Guerre’, Politis.fr (3
October 2010), accessed 13 March 2011.
Hacène Belmessous, Opération
banlieues, Comment l’Etat prépare la
guerre urbaine dans les cités françaises
(Paris: La Découverte, 2010).
Hacène Belmessous notes a slide
toward the concept of ‘national
security’, which he identifies with The
White Paper on National Security (2008).
In this guideline for French security
and military objectives, provisions
are made for, first, providing 10,000
soldiers in the case of domestic crisis
and, second, the creation of the Conseil
de défense et de sécurité nationale placed
directly under the President of France.
setomip newspaper promotion
for Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1971
Courtesy George Candilis Archive,
Institut Français d'Architecture, Paris
aa files 63
07/11/2011 09:47
Contributors
Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. After
graduating from the University Institute of Architecture in
Venice, he obtained masters and phd degrees at the Berlage
Institute/Delft University of Technology. His theoretical
studies focus on the relationship between architectural
form, political theory and urban history. He is the author
of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011) and is
a Diploma Unit Master at the aa and Histories and Theories
tutor. Together with Martino Tattara he is the co-founder
of Dogma, a prize-winning architectural collective focusing
on the project of the city.
Niall Hobhouse is a collector of architectural drawings.
Mario Botta was born in Mendrisio, Ticino in 1943. After
an apprenticeship in Lugano, he attended the Art College
in Milan and then completed his studies at the University
Institute of Architecture in Venice. He first started
practising as an architect in Lugano in 1970, and since then
he has tackled all building typologies including houses,
schools, banks, offices, libraries, museums and churches.
In addition to his work in practice, he was among the
founders of the Mendrisio Accademia, an architecture
school he currently directs. His work has been recognised
with numerous awards and has been presented in
exhibitions the world over.
Mark Lyon is a photographer and educator based in Paris.
He studied at Yale’s School of Art and participated in
Richard Avedon’s last master class in New York, and has
since received awards for his work from pdn/Nikon and the
Society for Publication Design and Communication Arts.
In the field of architecture and design, he has received
commissions to survey the work of Pierre Jeanneret and
Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, and to document the
restoration and travels of Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale
and the refurbishment of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre.
With Inderbir Singh Riar he recently received a grant from
the Graham Foundation to research the current living
conditions and architectural legacy of Toulouse-Le Mirail.
Timothy Brittain-Catlin taught in the general studies
programme at the aa from 2001 to 2007 and is now senior
lecturer and director of research at the Kent School of
Architecture, University of Kent. In 2010 he published
Leonard Manasseh & Partners, a monograph on the former
president of the aa.
Mark Crinson is professor of art history at the University
of Manchester. His most recent books include Modern
Architecture and the End of Empire (2003), the edited
collections Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern
City (2005) and James Stirling: Early Unpublished Writings on
Architecture (2009), and the co-edited collection (with
Claire Zimmerman) Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern:
Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010). His book
Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence
will be published by Yale University Press in 2012.
Caroline Evans is professor of Fashion History and Theory
at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
(University of the Arts London) where she teaches and writes
on twentieth-century and contemporary fashion. She is
currently working on a history of early fashion shows and
modernism to be published by Yale University Press in 2012.
Adrian Forty is professor of architectural history at the
Bartlett School of Architecture, ucl. His book Words and
Buildings, a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (2000) will be
republished by Thames and Hudson in early 2012 and his
new book, Concrete and Culture, will also appear in 2012.
54528_AA_Final.indd 120
Pamela Johnston is the aa’s publications editor. ‘A Theatre
of Insects’ is a compressed version of her ma dissertation
in the History of Ideas at Birkbeck, University of London.
Ashley Paine is a phd candidate in the atch Research Centre
at the University of Queensland, where he also teaches
architectural design and theory. His research combines
historical and theoretical investigation with design research
methods and practice to examine the use of stripes on
the architectural facade. He is also a practising architect,
establishing phab Architects in 2010.
Alessandra Ponte is professor of architecture at the
University of Montreal. She has written articles and essays
on landscape in numerous international publications,
published a volume on Richard Payne Knight and the
Eighteenth-Century Picturesque (2000) and co-edited, with
Antoine Picon, a collection of papers on Architecture and
the Sciences (2003). For the last four year she has been
responsible for the conception and organisation of the
Phyllis Lambert Seminar at the cca in Montreal, a series
of colloquia on contemporary architectural topics. She
organised the exhibition ‘Total Environment: Montreal
1965–1975’ (2009), also at the cca, and recently co-curated
and co-edited the aa exhibition and catalogue, GOD & CO:
François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (2011). She is currently
completing a series of investigations on North American
landscapes for her forthcoming book, Maps and Territories,
published in the aa’s Architecture Words series.
Inderbir Singh Riar teaches design and histories of modern
architecture at the Azrieli School of Architecture and
Urbanism at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is also a phd
candidate at the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, where
he is preparing a dissertation on the visionary architecture
of Expo 67.
Steven Spier is professor of architecture and head of the
School of Architecture and Design at the University of Ulster
in Belfast. Previously, he was the founding vice-chancellor
of the HafenCity University Hamburg, a University of
the Built Environment and Metropolitan Development.
He is the author of numerous articles on Swiss architecture,
including the book Swiss Made (2003), and also writes on
choreography, editing the first English-language book
on William Forsythe, William Forsythe and the Practice of
Choreography (2011).
Laurent Stalder is professor of architectural theory at the
eth Zurich. His research focuses on the intersection
of the history and theory of architecture with the history
of technology. Recent publications include Hermann
Muthesius: Das Landhaus als kulturgeschichtlicher Entwurf
(2008), Valerio Olgiati (2008), Der Schwellenaltas (2009,
with Elke Beyer, Anke Hagemann and Kim Förster) and
God & Co: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (2011,
with Alessandra Ponte and Thomas Weaver).
Victoria Watson teaches architecture at the University of
Westminster. In 2010 she received the British Academy’s Sargant Fellowship in Architecture for her work on the
Air Grid, a living system of forms derived from, but going
beyond, the structural logic of architecture. Her first
book, Utopian Adventure: The Corviale Void, is due for
publication in 2012. Her work has been exhibited
in a number of venues in London and Europe, and its
theoretical premise has been explored in texts published
in various books and journals.
John Winter is an architect, currently specialising in the
restoration of modernist buildings from the 1930s. He was
trained as an articled pupil, and then at the aa and Yale
University, and later taught at the aa, 1960–65, as well as
acting as a visiting professor at the universities of Toronto,
Syracuse and Yale, and teaching in the schools of
architecture at Cambridge, Canterbury and ucl. He is the
author and co-author of numerous books on architecture
and construction, while the buildings designed by his
practice have been widely published and exhibited.
Tao Zhu is is an assistant professor in the department of
architecture at the University of Hong Kong and a phd
candidate at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning
and Preservation, Columbia University. As co-founder of
the design firm zl Architecture he practises in China while
also writing on contemporary Chinese architecture and
urbanism. His most recent texts include a chapter – ‘Architecture in China in the Reform Era 1978–2010’ – in A Critical
History of Contemporary Architecture 1960–2010 (2012).
05/11/2011 15:12