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Fréderic Druot, Anne Lacaton y Jean-Philippe Vassal: Plus. La vivienda colectiva. Territorio de excepción
Francisco Javier Terrados Cepeda
Proyecto, Progreso, Arquitectura, ISSN-e 2173-1616, ISSN 2171-6897, Nº. 24, 2021, págs. 132-133
Table of contents: 0 Introduction 1 Attitude 2 Plus 2.1 Luxury and ease 2.2 Mass and system 2.3 History and pleasure 2.4 An exceptional case 2.5 A statement of accounts 2.6 Ecoculture 2.7 Norms 2.8 Electroshock 2.9 Public life 3 Catalogue 3.1 Housing 3.2 Communal space 4 Location 4.1 Aulnay-sous-Bois 4.2 Le Havre 4.3 Nantes 4.4 Trignac 5 Projects 5.1 Saint-Nazaire, Petit Marroc 5.2 Paris, Bois-le-Prêtre tower block 6 x times + 7 Appendix 7.1 Technical descriptions 7.2 Glossary of terms, entities and acronyms cited in the text |
Índice de contenidos: 0 Introducción 1 Actitud 2 PLUS 2.1 Lujo y facilidad 2.2 Masa y sistema 2.3 Historia y placer 2.4 Territorios de excepción 2.5 Estado de cuentas 2.6 Eco-cultura 2.7 Normas 2.8 Electrochoque 2.9 Vida pública 3 Catálogo 3.1 Vivienda 3.2 Espacio común 4 Emplazamientos 4.1 Aulnay-sous-Bois 4.2 Le Havre 4.3 Nantes 4.4 Trignac 5 Proyectos 5.1 Saint-Nazaire, Petit Maroc 5.2 París, torre de Bois-le-Prêtre 6 x veces + 7 Anexo 7.1 Descripciones técnicas 7.2 Glosario de términos, entidades y siglas citadas en el texto |
In the 1960s and 70s many communal housing complexes were built in France and throughout Europe which, while they managed to relieve the pressing postwar need for housing, present serious shortcomings today. Frédéric Durot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal confront this set of problems from a new angle and propose the radical transformation of such housing in order to adapt it to current lifestyles.
'Never demolishing, subtracting or replacing things, but always adding, transforming and utilising them'. This is the premise on which the authors proposal is based. Proceeding from an analysis of the elements that go to form the housing, in a survey that moves from inside to outside the building, the authors rehabilitate the pleasure of being an occupant on the basis of a precise and delicate attitude that takes all pre-existing factors into account.
The result is the seven projects presented here, some posited as studies and others, the winning schemes of architecture competitions, which are the prolongation of the objectives and ideas developed in the first.
En las décadas de 1960 y 1970 se construyeron en Francia y en toda Europa numerosos conjuntos de vivienda colectiva que, si bien lograron paliar la apremiante necesidad de viviendas de la posguerra, hoy en día presentan graves carencias. Frédéric Durot, Anne Lacaton y Jean-Philippe Vassal se enfrentan a esta problemática desde una actitud novedosa y proponen su radical transformación para adaptarlas a los modos de vida actuales.
'No derribar nunca, no restar ni reemplazar nunca, sino añadir, transformar y reutilizar siempre.' Esta es la premisa en la que se basa la propuesta de los autores. A partir de un análisis de los elementos que conforman la vivienda, en un recorrido que va de dentro afuera del edificio, los autores recuperan el placer de habitar desde una actitud precisa y delicada que tiene en cuenta todas las preexistencias. Los siete proyectos que aquí se presentan son el resultado de este planteamiento, en unos casos estudios y, en otros, propuestas ganadoras de concursos de arquitectura donde se desarrollan los objetivos y las ideas planteados en los primeros.
Texto de la introducción: Recuperar el Movimiento Moderno por Ilka y Andreas Ruby Los arquitectos franceses Druot, Lacaton y Vassal formulan una nueva estrategia para la regeneración de los grandes conjuntos de viviendas en Francia. Sucedió sin que nos diésemos realmente cuenta de ello no podemos decir con exactitud cuando empezó. Nos ha sido susurrado tantas veces al oído que casi hemos llegado a acostumbrarnos a contemplar el Movimiento Moderno como algo cerrado en sí mismo. Acaso un intento heroico el de romper con la historia, pero en definitiva un fracaso. Entretanto, hemos llegado a un lugar en la historia de la arquitectura que se sitúa en un momento anterior al Movimiento Moderno. Para los protagonistas de la retaguardia contemporánea, la auténtica patria histórica del presente se encuentra en ese pasado, que en realidad nunca existió. Aparece un nuevo Estilo Internacional que, por segunda vez, intenta revestir homogéneamente al mundo. Su origen está en Poundbury, la ciudad ideal que el arquitecto luxemburgués Léon Krier construyera a comienzo de la década de 1990 siguiendo el encargo del príncipe Carlos de Inglaterra. Mientras tanto, los Países Bajos, en su día campo de ensayo del Movimiento Moderno, se están convirtiendo en el apara- dor del tradicionalismo contemporáneo. Al mismo tiempo que la política cultural holandesa oficial emplea el SuperDutch país como tarjeta de presentación internacional, en las aglomeraciones suburbanas surge una serie de verdaderas pequeñas ciudades de corte tradicional. Para satisfacer el deseo de una vivienda de ensueño en los suburbios y, a la vez, escapar al carácter impersonal de la periferia, algunos arquitectos neo-conservadores -como Rob Krier y Christoph Kohl- comenzaron a proyectar numerosos barrios de casas unifamiliares en las poblaciones suburbanas contemporáneas, verdaderos parques temáticos a modo de paisajes fantásticos con identidades seudo-históricas. Simultáneamente, tuvo lugar un cambio en el clima político de la sociedad holandesa, que dejó de ser el lugar de la tolerancia multicultural para convertirse en la morada de un nacionalismo que ve en el inmigrante el chivo expiatorio de la nación y desearía devolverlo nuevamente a casa.
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Text from the introduction:
'Reclaiming Modernism
by Ilka and Andreas Ruby
French architects Druot, Lacaton and Vassal formulate a new strategy for the regeneration of mass housing in France
It happened without us noticing it and without being able to say when exactly it began. As the fact has been whispered in our ears thousands of times we have almost become used to viewing modernism as something that is finished; a heroic attempt to break out of history perhaps, but ultimately a failure. By now we have arrived at a post-history of architecture that, seen in temporal terms, lies before modernism. The protagonists of the contemporary retro-garde see the true historic home of our present in this past that never really existed. A new international style is growing up and is re-embarking on the task of plastering the world with its homogeneity. Poundbury, the model town that Prince Charles commissioned Luxembourg architect Leon Krier to build in the early 1990s, was only the start. In the meantime even the Netherlands, once the training camp of the Modern Movement, is becoming the parade ground of contemporary traditionalism. While the state cultural policy still presents Superdutch as the international symbol of Netherlands architecture, in the suburban conglomerations a series of entirely new towns in traditional settings have grown up. To fulfil the wish for a dream house in the suburbs, while still avoiding the facelessness of suburbia, neo-conservative architects such as Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl have begun to design one housing estate after another of single-family houses on sites in contemporary suburban towns. These estates are like theme parks that take the form of fantastical landscapes with quasi-historical identities. At the same time a change took place in the political climate of Dutch society, transforming it from the home of multicultural tolerance to the new abode of a nationalism that views the immigrant population as the scapegoat of the country and would best like to send these people back home.
In Germany this return to the past took place in the 1990s under the blessing of historic authenticity. The spectacular reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden that had been destroyed in the Second World War restored the building after a 40-year-long intermezzo as a ruinto its previous state, using the surviving original stones. This model case of what is known as an archaeological reconstruction was made possible by a computer programme devised by IBM, which simulated the collapse of the building caused by the bombing raid on 13 February 1945. By playing this simulation backwards it was possible to tell precisely where a certain stone in the mountain of rubble that made up the ruin had originally stood in the building. This reversed restaging of the collapse of the Frauenkirche in Dresden is the ideological diagram of a clearly unhistorical and fetishist interpretation of the past, for which urban planning from now on can only exist as a combination of reconstruction and restoration. Following the completion of the renovation of the Frauenkirche, the Baroque town houses of the surrounding district are also being reconstructed in exactly the same manner, with their historical plot sizes and original facades. In contrast to the Dutch example, where the sacred past is generally invok-ed on greenfield sites, in Dresden it has been necessary to demolish contemporary building fabric to permit the recreation of the historic stateas if in some way or other the more recent past were not also part of history. This bizarre form of urban development in reverse is not an individual case restricted to Dresden but has become the modus operandi of German architectural policy. To allow the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss in Berlin, which was demolished by the DDR in 1950 for ideological reasons, now, following the passing of a resolution by the German Parliament, the Palast der Republik, which was built from 1973-1976 at the same place, is to be demolished, also for ideological reasons. The reason for this demolition is clearly not that no function can be found for the Palast, as hundreds of cultural events held there in recent years within the framework of the acclaimed initiative Zwischenpalastnutzung prove that the opposite is in fact true. What upsets the political advocates of the demolition of the present in favour of a backward-looking reconstruction is this buildings symbolic quality. They can only view it as the architectural representation of the defunct GDR and are unable to see that the building itself and its potential could be exploited to serve a new contemporary use. Erected as the model project of an undemocratic state, for some people this building is seemingly permanently tainted with the ideological odour of those who built it and should therefore, they believe, expire on the pyre of architectural history. How arbitrary this guilt and atonement principle actually is when dealing with the political biographies of buildings can be seen in the fact that its champions apply it solely to buildings erected by the GDR regime. In contrast they can produce eloquent arguments why former representational buildings erected by the Nazi regime, such as the old Reichsbank or the old Luftfahrtministerium (Air Transport Ministry), are entirely suitable for housing the most august political institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany such as the Außenministerium (Foreign Ministry) and the Finanzministerium (Finance Ministry). Fundamentally, the idea of architectures political culpability is not only absurd (because a building is not a political subject) but it is also inimical to culture. After all, ultimately we owe our architectural and urban culture to a large extent to the fact that buildings often survived the ideological dogmas of those who built them. If the Parthenon had not been converted into a Christian church it would not have survived to the present day. Similarly, Hagia Sophia would not still exist if it had not been converted into a Muslim mosque. A number of the most important buildings in our cultural history have survived only because they have been reprogrammed ideologically (and generally also functionally), time and time again.
Naturally the protagonists of the demolition of modernism would here interject that buildings such as the Parthenon or Hagia Sophia have a claim to preservation due to their undoubted architectural qualityin complete contrast to the Palast der Republik. But who decides what defines quality? Given that every judgement says at least as much about the person who makes it as it does about the subject of the judgement, every interpretation of quality is tied to its times and lacks any absolute validity. For instance, the Renaissance disparagingly viewed the Gothic era as a barbaric mediaeval non-culture (for which the Goths were held responsible, pars pro toto). Johann Sebastian Bachs music vanished into a drawer for a hundred years after his death in 1750 because early 19th century classicism could not grasp the mighty, inwardly reflective quality of this Baroque church musician. It was only later generations that were able to appreciate such cultural achievements and to creatively appropriate them for the construction of their own cultural identity.
In the present day there are also good reasons why we should approach passing judgements about the quality of the recent cultural past with a certain degree of caution. Where we can find nothing of value in the architecture of a certain era, this does not allow us to deny its right to exist. On the contrary, the increasing pace of retro-acceleration the period of time after which a previously forgotten cultural epoch is rediscovered makes the relative nature of every cultural assessment clear.
Given the existence of urban challenges that are simply too great to be ignored or eliminatedfrom shrinking cities to ageing urban populations insisting on preserving well-nurtured prejudices seems indulgently self-referential. It would be far more constructive to tackle such problems using the kind of approach cultivated by Rem Koolhaas in the 1990s under the name Suspending Judgement. Koolhaas introduced this notion of delaying passing judgement in the 1980s to confront the architect once again with realities that an architecture that sees itself as critical tends to exclude. Koolhaas correctly argued that, even if one finds contemporary consumer society alienating, one must nevertheless examine it because shopping penetrates our day-to-day life to an increasing extent. In this way Koolhaas once again opened up an entire series of morally contaminated zones to critical discourse. Understood as an ethic of perception, the strategy of Suspending Judgement places architecture in a position to work on reality rather than ignore it. The more hopeless the realities confronting architects appear, the more this strategy expands their area of possible action.
This approach of Suspending Judgement is also the basis of the pioneering study Plus in which French architects Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal turn their attention to a reality that has so far been treated for the most part with ignorance by French architectural policy: the modern housing developments that were built in the suburbs of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. The population of these villes nouvelles is generally made up of people from lower income groups, a large proportion of whom are North-African immigrants. The social and ethnic segregation of today results in high unemployment levels and criminal-ity. The social tension created by this situation has given the banlieue a notoriously bad image that politicians want urgently to improve. For them the medium of this negative image is the architecture, the large residential towers that represent a highly visible monument to the social plight of the suburbs and the failure of French integration policy. Due to their ideological contamination the intention is to demolish most of these buildingsout of sight out of mind, as it were. As most of the apartments in question are occupied, the residents have to be provisionally housed in hotels until the new accommodation to be erected for them is completed. That this accommodation takes the form of single-family houses exposes the ideological and symbolic character of this measure. Apparently, the single-family house promises to provide the greatest possible contrast to the historically loaded typology of the modernist residential tower block. To achieve this goal there is seemingly a willingness to accept the clear economic disadvantages of this form of low-density housing moving the residents of a tower block into a single-family housing estate uses larger amounts of building land and requires additional access routes.
The patent absurdity of this kind of ideological cleansing of the built landscape led Druot, Lacaton and Vassal to a campaign of political enlightenment unparalleled in the architecture of the recent present. They sought discussions with political decision-makers and campaigned for a more sensitive handling of the architecture of the banlieue- transformation instead of demolition. In their study Plus, which was produced with the support of the Ministry for Culture and Communication, they show how the money made avail-able for the demolition could be far more sensibly used for the preservation and long-term maintenance of the dwellings in question. The authors of Plus never entertain any illusions about the fact that in most cases the architecture of the banlieue is little better than average. They do not see this as an argument for demolition but as a challenge to architects as a profession to transform and increase the value of this problematic existing substance by means of a kind of architectural tuning. For, if you take a look behind the creamy coloured facades, always in a shade somewhere between pink and beige, you find the same kind of skeleton frames used for high-rise apartment buildings in the smart areas of Paristhe difference is that in the latter case the facades are filigree constructions of steel and glass. The high-rise blocks of the banlieue could look just the same if they were treated with the same appreciation. Consequently, Plus started with the facades and replaced the unattractive external walls perforated with windows that are far too small with transparent floor-to-ceiling glazing so that, for the first time, the residents can enjoy the height and the location of their building in the form of light-flooded living rooms with panoramic views of a largely flat landscape. A further aspect of these architects transformation is their aim to increase the area of living space, a theme that runs like a red thread through the housing architecture of Lacaton and Vassal. In a critical examination of the modernist ideology of housing for the minimum existence, Lacaton and Vassal attempted in their early and smaller housing projects to double the size of the living area that a client could normally afford for his budget. Consequently, they also attempt to double the size of the living area in Plus. This is made possible by a strategy of addition that also recalls earlier projects: in both the Latapie House and the house in Coutras they placed an extra space in front of the actual living area, which climatically resembles a winter garden that can be programmed by the residents themselves. In Plus they applied the same principle in the form of an extension that expands each apartment outwards with a kind of integrated loggia. This measure is possible because the addition is entirely structurally independent of the existing building. Its weight is carried by its own structure and places no additional load on the old building. This increase in the total living area allows the floor plans to be designed in a more generous way. Non-structural spatial partitions could be removed and out of a number of tiny rooms a flowing spatial sequence could be made that, thanks to the transparent facade, also includes the external spaces.
The principle of Plus, which involves continuing the existing high-rise building with a structurally independent spatial layer, reduces the disruption caused to residents lives during the construction works to a minimum. The individual works can be carried out one after the other, always leaving a number of rooms in each apartment inhabitable. The entire new front structure is prefabricated in individual storeys and placed against the old building. The outside wall of the old building is then demolished and replaced by the new glass facade.
A further concern of the architects of Plus is the programmatic re-establishment of the high-rise. They make a critical examination of the institutionalisation of social housing in postwar Europe, in which housing was increasingly reduced to the individual apartment. Uses and spaces where individuals could meet outside their own four walls to experience a sense of social community were eliminated. The Berlin version of the unité dhabitation, which Le Corbusier realised in 1956 at the Berlin Interbau exhibition, confirms in exemplary fashion the programmatic impoverishment of housing. All the social facilities of the Marseilles unité, which were not envisaged in the subsidy guidelines of the Federal Republic of Germanys social housing policy, were simply eliminated from the Berlin project. What remained was a mono-functional human storage institution that simply ignored any other housing needs of the 1500 residents. Plus declares war on this housing monoculture, which gradually became the norm for social housing in postwar Europe. In the process the architects deliberately refer back to the early vision of modernism in which housing was understood and organised as a social osmosis between the individual space of the apartment and the collective space of communal functionsin addition to Le Corbusiers unité other examples of this approach include the pioneers of Soviet revolutionary architecture. It is above all the lower storeys that Plus reclaims as spaces for the community. For example, the entrance area on the ground floor that formerly housed only the letterboxes is transformed into a hotel-like reception area with security and reception staff and an adjoining lounge and a cinema. On the first floor there is a laundrette and a restaurant, on the second floor a kindergarten and a hammam, and, lastly, on the third floor a swimming pool and offices. In this way the lower floors that are less suitable as living space because they have poorer views and limited privacy can be used to provide attractive and lively spaces for the community. But on the purely residential floors above, too, an attempt is made not to reduce the notion of housing to the apartment alone. Thanks to the spatial expansion of the existing floor plan by means of the newly attached structure, the individual apartments can be connected by galleries in front of them that can be informally programmed by the residents according to their needs.
With this kind of constructional, typological and programmatic overall renewal of modernist residential buildings, the architects of Plus make it clear that the inheritance of modernism must by no means be seen as something complete or finished but, like every other building or urban fragment, can be appropriated by its successors. They show that the project of modernism can be continued if it is liberated from its original absolute qualities and is related to the concrete needs of a new historical situation. In this work on modernism some central claims of historical modernism are exposed to a fundamental revision and at places lastingly redefined. The architects of Plus generally sympathise with the intention behind these claims, while distancing themselves from the way and means in which they were implemented.
One of these claims is the principle of the dwelling for the minimum existence. The intention behind this was to provide affordable living space for as many people as possible, and Druot, Lacaton and Vassal still share this intention today. However, they are not in agreement with the modernist conclusion that the minimum amount of space a human being supposedly needs to live should be provided from the minimal budget that society is prepared to provide for housing. For them the desire for living space is a primordial need that ought not to be conditioned by anticipatory obedience to the dictates of a budget, and particularly not by the simplistic mathematical assumption that all one can expect for a modest budget is modest architecture. Plus proves the contrary and shows that with the budget available for the demolition of the old housing blocks, the temporary accommodation of the residents and the new construction of replacement dwellings, the existing residential buildings can be renovated, significantly enlarged and improved in terms of quality in a long-lasting way.
A further claim of modernism that the Plus protagonists unexpectedly take most seriously is the free floor plan. Up to the present day architects generally relate the concept of the free floor plan to the structural aspect of architecture. The free plan of the Maison Dom-ino allows a simple structural system to be used by replacing the walls with a few columns and articulating the space by means of non-structural partitions. It is primarily the architects who profit from this freedom of construction, because it simplifies the design process. The flexibility of the spatial organisation promised to the residents is almost never provided. Often its place is taken by a purely aesthetic notion of the free plan, which, as in the case of Mies van der Rohe, is elevated to an ideal space that is apparently open for all kinds of uses but ultimately tolerates no changes. In contrast Druot, Lacaton and Vassal in Plus make unrestricted use of the changeability made possible by the free plan. Partitions are eliminated or shifted, solid external walls are replaced by fully glazed facades, balconies are added to transform the small-minded, pigeonhole approach to housing demonstrated by a modernism organised entirely on a functionalist basis into radically generous living environments at reasonable prices. The change in the overall impression made by the high-rise buildings dealt with in the context of Plus is so striking that one is involuntarily reminded of the fairy tale of the Frog King. The entire aesthetic poverty of the earlier buildings is shaken off like in a bad dream by a powerful architectural performance that finally reclaims the social achievement of housing as public property and celebrates it in a self-confident way. The uniformly unimaginative character of the existing fabric, with its stereotypical perforated facades enlivened by cheerful coloured patterns, which reminds us of the guilty conscience of postmodern architecture, is replaced by a rigorously modern formal idiom, with continuous loggias in front of fully glazed facades that refer back to the modern housing blocks of Casablanca, where Jean-Philippe Vassal was born in 1953 and where he spent his childhood.
That the architects from Plus refer so unambiguously to classic modernism may seem totally at odds with the fact that they absolutely and unconditionally reject one of the most important claims of modernism, namely the tabula rasa the elimination of the historic city and its replacement with a zero degree state of the ground to allow the construction of a new city. Most of the European cities that were destroyed in the bombing of the Second World War were rebuilt in this manner in the 1950s or, as many would put it, were destroyed for a second time. But this is something that one cannot accuse Druot, Lacaton and Vassal of, because they always continue building the past: Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform and reuse. As they reject the modernist policy of decimating history but formally articulate their rejection in a clearly modernist architectural language, in a sense they cross the opposing ideologies of modernism and contextualism: they contextualise the modern and modernise contextualism. But whereas the contextualist notion of the city is essentially restricted to the European city as it developed over the course of time, Druot, Lacaton and Vassal consciously apply the contextualist ethic of preservation to the modern city, which the contextualists branded as the incarnation of the anti-urban. In contrast to contextualism, which seeks to continue weaving the fabric of context in as homogeneous a way as possible, the protagonists of Plus apply new pieces of a different material to it, producing a kind of patchwork quilt as a result. By preserving the old they avoid modern architectures ignorance of history. By designing the expansion in a radically modern way they liberate themselves from the hegemony of the existing fabric, which is, in fact, the central problem of contextualism, as it forces every new intervention into the formal pattern of the existing fabric. The relationship of Druot, Lacaton and Vassal to the context is never formal, but always performative: the role of the new intervention does not lie in simulating what already exists, but in reanimating it and exploiting its latent potential.
With this approach of combining a strategic departure from modernism with a formal affirmation of it, the authors of Plus place themselves in the ranks of those who, in the tradition of Jürgen Habermas, regard modernism as an unfinished project. They settle the score with a number of its errors such as the cynical theory of the minimum existence, the inconsequential symbolism of apparent flexibility and the historic ignorance demonstrated by the tabula rasa. They do not on this account write off modernism but work on it like a gardener who grafts the shoots from his best new trees onto his existing ones. Their commitment to the possibilities of this kind of reflective modernism often seems like a delayed echo of the farcical way in which modernism is depicted in the films of Jacques Tati. They attempt to restore to modernism precisely that authenticity and historic sustainability which Tati polemically denied it and which, in films such as Mon Oncle, he could only find in the old city. By winning a competition set up by a state housing society for the rehabilitation of the Bois-le-Prêtre tower, a typical residential high-rise block from the 1960s on the urban periphery of Paris, Lacaton and Vassal have been presented with an opportunity to prove the claims made in their study. The successful realisation of their project could lead political decision-makers to reconsider the premises of their demolition campaign and to reformulate the intentions of a renovation urbaine in such a way that it actually deserves its name.
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