35matcult

A 1962 housing complex by Paul Bossard in Créteil expresses something approximate to Le Corbusier’s treatment of materials at the Maisons Jaoul. Forty makes interesting observations here about the logic of construction. For, with Les Bleuets, as they are called, there is a combination of the hand-made with a precast panel system. Bossard evolved the design from his student diploma project and, against the norms of professional roles within the French building industry, undertook to design the precast system himself and oversee in detail its assemblage on-site. The large pieces of shale embedded in the roughly textured concrete panels were placed by the construction workers at the site whilst the concrete was still wet, with the variability of skill in this process of rapid, ‘primitive’ appliqué embraced as a part of the material ethos of the project. Forty, with reference to the work of architect Vilanova Artigas in São Paulo, makes a useful comparison between the play of the primitive and the sophisticated across European and South American brutalism. For Artigas, as Forty quotes, the ‘ideological content of European brutalism […] brings with it a cargo of irrationalism’. Within this cargo is the conceit of the persistence of an aesthetic of austerity – of the primitive inflection of the hand of the unskilled labourer – way beyond the actual period of post-war material shortage in Europe. Within South America, on the other hand, unskilled labour remained a fundamental part of the economics of the building site. However, whilst a late Le Corbusian aesthetic may have continued to influence the manipulation of the concrete surface well into the 1970s within aspects of architectural practice in the UK, the scene in Paris by no means yields evidence of such an allegiance. In assembling the itinerary of the map we quickly realised the necessity of abandoning the material relationship to the traces of manual labour as an essential benchmark of the brut and, instead, reconfigured the terms of brutalism according to the material and technological cultures of the precast system and the machined surface. Here I focus (among the many possible examples) on our encounters with the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet.

Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss’s 1958 UNESCO complex

Paul Bossard, le Bleuets, Créteil, 1962

Nigel Green/Photolanguage

On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture

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