These are frequently traversed spaces, serving a successful domestic interior, and yet are also subject to the effects of failure and withdrawal as urban spaces. They are highly wrought spaces of architectural authorship, of extreme spatial and material deliberation, but also of contingency and decay. They are a programmatic hybrid that defies easy assimilation. Cité Rateau presents a dynamic, fragmented cliff face to its main urban interface with rue Rateau, whilst to the rear the scheme cascades down from 7th to ground floor in the overlapping and constantly shifting orientations of the terracing characteristic of Ivry. The street frontage is deeply incised and hollowed, a space of transitional access to the apartments at ground floor and successive deck levels, with staircases visible as their own volumetric expressions behind the frame of the outer facade panelling. The volumes of the apartments break beyond this framework at higher level in a stepped rhythm descending to meet the more diminutive housing around it, and anticipating the more complex volumetric arrangements behind. The ground floor of this façade yields a surprising complexity as one journeys through it and extends in places to the depth of something more like an under-croft. The material palette is more variegated than that of the earlier Ivry, with brick and seemingly more provisional breeze-block sections appearing amid the cast concrete, concrete panelling and render. A mid-grey paint occurs intermittently, picking out a sequence of surfaces as if there had been an attempt, not to colour code the surfaces according to architectonic performance, but to lead the eye through complex recessional plains, to tempt engagement in a scopic exploration. (It is likely, of course, that this spatial play of grey is not original, but a later effort of maintenance, which pursues and erases the interventions of graffitists.) Here structure morphs into screen and ‘decoration’ with columns diversely shaped – splayed and spread as if they were assembled from something like the splintered fragments of the façade panelling system. Staircases and horizontal first floor connecting walkways further fragment the visual field and are, in turn, supported by a smaller, seemingly ad hoc structural system of columns, like concrete props or scaffolding. Despite Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s incredible capacities of spatial
imagination and draughtsmanship, one cannot help but think that this is a space beyond drawing, beyond specification, and perhaps in part given over to the contractor to provide improvised solutions based on practical knowledge. Only one figure traversed this space during our visit – a lone female seemingly unsure of her destination. Post boxes in one section of what was apparently conceived originally as an open foyer, seem to have been long abandoned. Almost all of the fenestration at the ground level was closed with an industrial grade metal shuttering, and it was unclear what type of space, or combination of spaces, was behind it: domestic, storage, commercial or studio. This complex space of circulation, screen, shelter and structure would seem to provide myriad opportunities for appropriation: for concealment, for storage; for the chance encounter or the ambush; the improvised event and activity, industrious or celebratory and social. Yet, the space seems hollowed and left latent. Although suggestive in equal measure of a space of urban deviancy and of architectural festival, it plays host to neither. The materials of the architecture of ‘difference’ have the appearance of being merely scenographic, the vacated shell of the propositional thesis. Less the connecting tissue of the ‘combinatory’ system to the surrounding city, such spaces now appear like the uncertain buffer zones between Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s utopianism and the spaces of the everyday. n
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
bibliography Reyner Banham, ‘The New Brutalism’ The Architectural Review , December 1955, pp. 354-61 Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books, 2012 Nigel Green and Robin Wilson, Brutalist Map of Paris London: Blue Crow Media, 2016 Andrew Higgot, ‘Memorability as Image: New Brutalism and Photography’, in Higgott and Wray (eds) Camera Constructs Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp 283-94 Philip Johnson and Reyner Banham, ‘School at Hunstanton’, The Architectural Review , September 1954, pp 148-58 John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities . New York: Routledge, 2007 Irénée Scalbert, A Right To Difference: The Architecture of Jean Renaudie . London: AA Publications, 2004
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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