the combinatory system: material futurity and unmappable zones Within the multi-phased project at Ivry and subsequent smaller developments at la Cité Rateau, la Courneuve by Jean Renaudie (1987), and la Cité de la Maladrerie, Aubervilliers by Renée Gailhoustet (1984), it is the complexities of the plan and its social thesis – to be achieved at scale – that dominate the material and constructive regime. Through the vertical layering of a triangulated or star-shaped plan, subsequently subjected to morphing actions of cut and rotation, Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s architecture accedes to a radical principle of difference. The combinatory system of Les Étoiles, as Iréné Scalbert has identified it, of over- lap and interconnection proposed a unique space for every household that prioritised the spaces of collective living over provision for the individual. This allowed complexity and irregularity within the plan to generate an evolving appropriation of space, from interior to exterior. The work of spatial complexity, variation and interrelationship – the ‘effect of one apartment configuration upon another necessitated never- ending adjustments’ – is ultimately directed toward facilitating self-management by the inhabitants within the evolution of different patterns of communal encounter and life across the commercial, professional and domestic strata of the cité. Certainly, at Ivry and the other Parisian sites of Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s combinatory’ architecture, the honesty of material expression in relation to structure and the traces of labour is not an absolute value. In these sites, there is little conception of a model or ideal viewer; no desire to play with the perceptual acuity of a sophisticated eye at a material level; there is no concession to material conceit in Artigas’s terms. By contrast, there is a more genuine democratisation of material aesthetics in Renaudie and Gailhoustet by the priority afforded to the pragmatics of the constructive task toward the achievement of hitherto unattained spatial complexity en masse . Another reflection on the discourse of the material surface here is time: its positioning in relation to temporal categories. Material surface on later brutalist work is not, for the most part, an index of the actions of making and labour on the building site. Whilst surfaces bare the traces of use and abuse and of weathering over time, the materials of Renaudie and Gailhoustet do not register the past tense in this way. Concrete
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
Jean Renaudie, Cité Rateau, la Courneuve, 1987 The main urban interface with rue Rateau
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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