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Enseignement Cours – Le Corbusier : paysages pour l’âge de la machine L’enjeu du paysage est présent dans toute l’œuvre de Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965), que ce soit à titre latent ou à titre manifeste. Si certains de ses bâtiments font office de chambre claire captant les vues sur les territoires les entourant, d’autres, tels la chapelle de Ronchamp ou le couvent de La Tourette, sont déterminés dans leur conception même par le paysage dont ils sont en quelque sorte issu...

Conférence inaugurale : Architecture, modernité, modernisation Conférence prononcée le 21 mai 2014 Les rapports de l’architecture avec le champ de la connaissance, avec la littérature et avec la ville sont au centre du propos de la conférence. Dans le même temps qu’elle a dressé des palais – ou des usines – pour la recherche au cours des deux derniers siècles, l’architecture empruntait à la science modèles et métaphores. Les sciences ont-elles été pour autant hospitalières pour l’architecture...

Avec d'autres, comme Guy Burgel, nous sommes quelques-uns à observer Moscou depuis très longtemps ; à l'avoir pratiquée, traversée et à nous être interrogés sur la Moscou « tardo-bolchévique » et néo-capitaliste ; enfin, à avoir essayé de la comprendre. Je relis aujourd'hui avec un peu d'embarras mes premiers textes des années 1970 qui étaient dans l'exégèse du schéma général de 1971, que Olga Vendina a analysé de façon très intéressante ce matin. J'avais assez naïvement pris pour argent comptant les grandes projections, notamment en matière de transport, de nouvelles centralités, de transformation urbaine, de ce document qui a été un guide pendant très...

One of the main attitudes of designers involved in the modernization of architectural and urban culture in the twentieth century was to dissolve the connection with the continuous city inherited by history, and to propose the alternative figure of an open space punctuated by free-standing buildings. Rather than interpreting the history of Modernist planning and architecture as a series of failures to implement innovative schemes of a utopian nature, the way critics celebrating Brasilia and scorning its spontaneous suburbs would do, the author proposes two hypotheses. The first one is an invitation to consider the body of heterotopias imagined and produced as more significant than the body of utopias on which historical narratives have focused. The second one is an invitation to consider cities overlooked in planning histories because they have no clearly identified master plan or master composition. Heterotopias can be viewed as particular ways of shaping usage, but indeed not of building urbanity.

A citação é uma operação fundamental de todas as práticas artísticas e literárias, assim como de todas as formas discursivas da vida cotidiana e tem sido uma prática amplamente difundida no discurso arquitetônico desde o Renascimento. O que dizer da citação em produções não verbais? A intertextualidade atua em várias áreas da teoria e da prática de arquitetura e sua consideração permite entender a reverberação de ideias e projetos de diferentes autores sobre os de seus contemporâneos ou sucessores. Intericonicidade, intertectonicidade e, especialmente, a transurbanidade são categorias relevantes para a compreensão da circulação local, nacional ou universal de imagens, caracteres materiais e formas urbanas na constituição do tecido histórico concreto das cidades.

Le Louvre Abou Dabi, concu par l’architecte Jean Nouvel, a ete inaugure le 11 novembre 2017. © Mohamed Somji/Musee du Louvre. La rencontre a ete organisee en contrepoint du cours donne par Jean-Louis Cohen au printemps 2017 sur l’architecture de Frank Gehry, afin d’elargir la perspective ouverte sur une œuvre marquante dans le domaine, mais aussi pour examiner certaines des directions depuis l’inauguration du musee Guggenheim de Bilbao en passant par la politique des musees en Europe et en ...

Extraits de la conference de Frank Gehry, en conversation avec Jean-Louis Cohen Jean-Louis CohenL’experience du musee Guggenheim de Bilbao a constitue un tournant dans votre travail. C’est un bâtiment phare par son programme et son emplacement mais aussi parce que de nouvelles strategies de conception ont ete utilisees pour la premiere fois a cette echelle, et cela grâce aux ordinateurs. Ils ont en effet permis non seulement de produire des images mais aussi de concevoir, calculer et edifier ...

Hubert Damisch Noah's Ark: Essays on Architecture Translated from the French by Julie Rose; edited and with an introduction by Anthony Vidler. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016, 392 pp., 61 b/w illus. $30.95/£25.95 (paper), ISBN 9780262528580 French readers will have good reason to be envious. Noah's Ark , an anthology of the essays of Hubert Damisch, is not simply the translation of an existing volume by the author of A Theory of Cloud —the first book by which he became known in 1972.1 Instead, it is a truly new editorial creation. We should bear in mind that Damisch is hardly unknown to English readers, who have had access to his magisterial Origin of Perspective since 1994.2 In the field of architecture and critical urban thinking, his insightful texts on the cities of the New World were translated in 2001 under the title Skyline: The Narcissistic City , five years after the publication of the original collection.3 Despite some occasional and limited translations, the entire spectrum of his reflections on architecture since the 1960s has never been made available, even to the Francophone audience. This deficiency is all the more paradoxical given that Damisch has unquestionably remained unique among French intellectuals of the past decades for his dedication to making architecture and urban form into a field of theoretical and critical research. He has avoided the kind of condescension or amateurism displayed by writers from established disciplines, as well as the opportunism of most authors who have looked down on architecture from the Olympian heights of their disciplines. Instead, he has approached the subject without any trace of smugness or self-importance in terms of its fundamental constitution and its intersections …

Cohen traces the origin of Le Corbusier's Centrosoyuz building in Moscow, the headquarters of the Cooperative movement, from the unprecedented 1928 commission by Soviet architects awarded to Le Corbusier, to its ultimate completion and interpretation by architect Nikolai Kolli in 1936. Cohen follows the unfavorable and even hostile reception that the Centro -soyuz was accorded until the reappraisal of Soviet modernism during the Khruschev era. Finally, Cohen analyzes the present state of Centrosoyuz, as modified by later alterations, and argues that the original polychrome colors and circulation scheme might be restored—though such a restoration might project Corbusier's unrealized visions, rather than any state in which the building ever actually existed as built.

Aurélien Delpirou, animateur du débat, maître de conférences à l'Institut d'urbanisme de Paris, rédacteur en chef de la revue Métropolitiques, historien Dominique Alba, directrice générale de l'Atelier parisien d'urbanisme, APUR Catherine Barbé, directrice des partenariats stratégiques à la Société du Grand Paris, SGP Christiane Blancot, directrice d'études à l'APUR Jean-Louis Cohen, professeur en histoire de l'architecture à la New York University Annie Fourcaut, professeur d'histoire contemporaine à l'université Paris 1, Centre d'histoire sociale du xxe siècle Hartmut Frank, professeur émérite à la faculté d'architecture, Hafen Universität Hamburg. Gérard Lacoste, directeur général adjoint de l'Institut d'aménagement et d'urbanisme de la région Île-de-France, IAU-ÎdF...

La réflexion sur le Grand Paris est fortement imprégnée par l’urbanisme du IIe Reich allemand. Les deux versions successives du plan d’extension de Paris qu’Eugène Hénard élabore en liaison avec le Musée Social sont uniquement publiées à Berlin, respectivement dans les pages de la revue Der Städtebau et dans celles du catalogue de l’exposition d’urbanisme de 1910. Peu après, les rapporteurs de la Commission d’extension parisienne soulignent l’importance qu’il y a à tirer d’« utiles leçons de l'étranger », à commencer par le Grand Berlin. Dans la préparation du concours de 1919, des documents sur Berlin sont mis à la disposition des participants. Lauréat de la section du concours portant sur le plan d’ensemble de la région, Léon Jaussely développe les principes qu’il avait formulés en 1910 pour la capitale allemande. Parmi d’autres observateurs d’Outre-Rhin, le vétéran Joseph Stübben analysera quant à lui dans la revue Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit le détail les projets parisiens.

The way architecture relates to knowledge, literature and the city is central to this first lecture at the College de France. Over the last two centuries it has both erected palaces – and factories – for research, and borrowed models and metaphors from science. Yet has science welcomed architecture as an intellectual discipline, a field of research as such? Nothing could be less certain. Since 1970, genuine scientific research has been devoted to architecture, and this has contributed to its ...

The last decade has seen an explosion of scholarly works dealing with colonial architecture and town planning, a domain previously marginal in the historiography. In any case it has aroused the attention of ever more numerous researchers, a fact that has stimulated this attempt to take stock of it, by drawing on cases studied by this author in his own work. The exploration of colonialism now constitutes a significant field of doctoral research, of studies associated with the identification and protection of built heritage, and tends to mould new images in the history of architecture from the last few centuries. In actual fact, the innumerable works on the twentieth century – the subject here – comprise only a fraction of all the studies concerning nearly five centuries of colonization, if the beginning of the colonial era is identified with the discovery of America and the establishment of the first European trading posts in Africa.

ituated at the intersection of practice and history, architecture exhibitions have increased dramatically in number since the 1960s. Once rather an exception in art museums, they have played a central role in architectural education in the twentieth century, both in schools still based on the traditional Beaux-Arts model, however modernized, and in those derived from Bauhaus pedagogy. Such exhibitions were, however, relatively rare in cultural institutions, where architecture was featured only during celebrations of major figures past or present, or within the framework of the world's fairs and universal expositions. In the past three decades, however, architecture exhibitions have experienced exponential growth, while at the same time becoming the privileged site for unveiling scholarly research. Catalogues, the publication of which is made possible by such events, are steadily becoming primary outlets for historiographic discoveries. Previously episodic, the direct involvement of architectural historians in exhibitions has evolved rapidly from a mere extension of a historian's primary professional activity to become, at times, its primary vehicle. Indeed, a veritable curatorial market has emerged, in which academics, museum curators, and freelance historians compete for the limited resources of specialized museums of architecture and the architecture and design departments created within art museums since 1980. Thousands of shows, from the largest, with blockbuster appeal, to the much more modest monographic exhibits, have thus found their way into galleries in schools, museums, and emerging architecture centers.1 Once we acknowle ge that the most popular of these exhibitions attract an audience that has little in common with the audience for

Contrary to what the myth of the irresistible progress of forms and techniques would have us believe, the experience of architectural modernity is not just one of success. “Reinforced concrete, the Radiation of French Thought and creation throughout the world”, illustration in Cent ans de béton armé, 1849-1949, Paris, 1949. Many of the expectations generated by the industrial era – which led to remarkable experiments – were not met, and the early moderns’ attempts were often disfigured once...