surfaces are of a serviceable smoothness, with no particular level of attention to precision in the finish (being neither especially precise nor loose). A concrete render protects facade and structural members at street level and also facilitates the use of colour in the later phases of Ivry. Large, bespoke, precast panelling defines much of the housing façade and exhibits an equally pragmatic materiality – a robust agent of spatial tectonics in service of the speculations of the plan. As a speculative space, anticipatory of an as yet unknown future of social relations, the material traces of the past as an ‘as found’ aesthetic and an ideological implication of labour, have no place. The present temporal immediacy of the material and spatial system is thus made ‘neutral’ in support of the project’s programmatic futurity. This particular category of space within the work of Renaudie and Gailhouste lead us to the complex threshold spaces between the architecture of the ‘combinatory’ system and its surrounding urbanism. As producers of the brutalist map we capture the external, iconic image of the architecture of our itinerary. As architectural tourists to the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet we cannot experience the architecture as do inhabitants of the interior life of the ‘combinatory’ system. However, we can, as travellers within the urban conditions at the fringes of the wider city, validly report back our experience of the contact, or, indeed, contract, between the city in the spatial inter-zones and thresholds of transition from the older, normative urban order to the space of ‘difference’. Spending sometimes uneasy periods in these zones, we recorded them with uneven levels of care and detail. I realise now that their conflicting combination of attributes might define them to be pockets of the hard picturesque of the contemporary city – difficult urban space persisting within the more formally recognised and accepted brutalist environment. It is an ‘ugly’ brutalism, one that has evolved, not toward broader popular acceptance, but to a more virulent state of repulsion: unmappable.
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
Jean Renaudie and Renee Gailhoustet, Cité les Etoiles, Ivry Town Centre, 1972
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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