Professional Documents
Culture Documents
o the generation
t placed between
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>stered for very
e precedents for
the early 1960s,
d in the work of
Since he
most
1e become
with curvilinear
ised
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r sombre colour.
e culminates in
1 porticos and
mt of subtle
ptures which
-like beings
Camden Art
of these shapes
:l Bolus, and that
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that only by
1e role of
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uld be
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s or 'socalled'
1st the ebullience
:ors such as those
1 gift to the Tate,
definite a way to
1 adjunct to a
ieces, to be
sions, whose
too insistent for
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Such a division
:orporated into a
ystem, and that
!em artificial to
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f art is for
and the
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<e the idea of
rought out for
ons would really
ferent they
Jasia Reichardt
Piscator
Hayward Gallery, London 21 July- 5 September,
1971
The work of Erwin Piscator has become
familiar in the adaptations of his ideas by
Brecht, but the intensity and stirring quality
of his designs in the 20's are, clearly, far too
little known. His theatrical productions are
direct counterparts of the work of George
Groz and John Heartfield- they might
indeed, be described as three-dimensional
photomontages. ('\nd Piscator was probably
quite conscious of his debt to his friends.
But if he took up ideas from some friends,
he inspired others - he it was who
commissioned and first thought of Walter
Gropius' total-theatre design.
The exhibition, organized first by the
Deutsche Akademie der Kiinste, Berlin, is
small, but inspiring. The catalogue is also
small, but most informative.
Utopia & Vision The exh;b;tion w" d .. ;gned to
10
.,1 1901 the Paris (the only
I 1 realized Utop1a of modern t1mes, the
organizers suggest), but rather than focus
Moderna Museet. Stockholm June - September,
1971
I
attention on the barricades and the historical
drama of the occasion, five themes have
been chosen- work, money, newspapers,
schools and homelife- that might suggest
something of the life of the time.
I .
The legendary gunner of the Commune, Hortense David.
Entrance to the Ecole des BcauxArts, Rue Bonaparte, Paris.
534 AD/9/71
Wednesday, 27th January 1971.
In the vast, echoing glass-roofed Palais des
Etudes at the Beaux-Arts about 200 people
are lost in the midst of broken plaster
statues, relics of a time past. Three screens
are erected and in the darkened, cavernous
space Carousel projectors compete; the two
left hand screens show projects done by
visiting fifth year students of the
Architectural Association, London; the
screen on the right shows the activities of UP 6
of the former Beaux-Arts school. There is
a strange and unnerving disparity between
them, a disparity enhanced by the efforts of
the AA leadership to draw close to the
Beaux-Arts by comparing the seemingly
imminent closure of the AA with the violent
political engagement which is evident from
the militant posters portrayed on the UP6
screen. 'We too are in a political
situation .. .'begins Peter Cook but he is
wrong, we are all wrong; compared to those
UP 6 students who work on building sites,
go to prison for spraying slogans on walls,
build community centres for immigrant
labourers, float newspapers demanding
'EVERYfHlNG', invade the offices of
536 AD/9/71
-
The AA fifth year visit. Confrontat ion with UP6 in
the Palais des Etudes
AA visit. The story of Archigram. Peter Cook
explains
government ministers, hold lectures in the
Louvre, department stores, or the street
we are not political. We do not know what
the word means.
On the AA screens appear collages of
USAF Hercules transport ail craft delivering
emergency housing instead of troops or
defoliants; there are girls in bikinis reclininF
in nifty inflatables; a neighbourhood TV
system called NKTV (too close to NKVD);
projects for mobile living - it is all too much
like a kind of sententious foolery suddenly
taken to task. The uneasy English students
explaining their projects sense it too; it only
needs a sidelong glance at the Beaux-Arts
screen, burning cars, massed police, clubbed,
silently shrieking students, redevelopment
protests, posters called The Struggle Goes
On' with a forest of fists gripping spanners.
Slowly the London school loses its initiative.
A strange almost terror-stricken air descends.
A Fun Palace appears on the AA screens.
' Pretty trite that stuff on the right,' observes
an AA student; I wonder if he will be
murdered. On the Beaux-Arts screen appear
threats against patrons and flies, oaths of
solidarity toward embattled workers. A
translator explains a 'piste dragster' which
has appeared on the left. 'Does this not
make you angry?' I ask a French student. ' We
are angry, but we are also polite,' is his
reply.
For two hours the difference between
being an architectural student in Britain and
being a part of UP 6 at the ex-Ecole des
Beaux Arts becomes clearer and clearer.
During those two hours the desire to find
out what these students and teachers have
done, and why they began to do it, grips the
authors of this issue. Emptily one of them
6
vows to reveal to the world the story of UP
This. 111311 v months later. their attempt.
Th . stor) begills w1th the d1smtegratton of a
of architectural education that once
r:d the world and then came within _fi fty
ears to represent al l that was archa1c,
rorrupt and obscure about architecture.
Without them one could 1emain at any
pa1 t u.:ula1 stage Ill perpet uity: with t hem one
would steadily progress until assuming
that one had been born under a lucky star-
one m1gllt graduate with the promise of a
JOb 111 t he offi ce of the patron, and then
(after further faithful servitude) find jobs
coming ones way from the same source. This
system has been accurately described as
' Malthusian' from its resemblance to the
theory of population control advanced by
Thomas Mal thus in which population was
a
n - __ D _- _I_ supposed to regulate itsetf automatically
-cA., according to the vicissitudes of food supply.
In the French university system - where
1 .. 1 J . entry was guaranteed by the possession of a
Glt ./[ """lqA,.(. Baccalaureat this meant that the wastage
1 rate was colossal but that each graduate was
in fact assured of a job and high social status
'If you have understood nothing that 1 have as a reward for his long years of study. At
said the cause rests with you, my dear young the E.cole des Beaux-Arts the system worked
sir. It is a matter of biology. In my opinion the rather differently because there was no
teaching I have given up to now has been automatic entry on possession of
M. Zavaroni Baccalaureat, but as we have seen, an
admission course which was competitive.
'The class struggle '?That's rubbish. It's a matter
of being born under a lucky star.'
M. Dengler
'The events of May? They happened because we
banned their wild parties, the Rougevin festival,
all that stuff. These buggers have to ejaculate
Even so the number of graduates was small
(today France has only. 8.000 architects as
opposed to over 20,000 in both Britain and
llaly) and almost all graduates were assured
of a future through the patronage that
governed the whole education system. The
first Diplomas were awarded in 1867, not
until Petain's administration of 194044 was
somehow!'
M. Chappey the practice of architecture regulated by
The above quotations are taken from a
publication of the Assemblee Generale (AG)
of the staff and students of the ex-Ecole
Natwflale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris:
now the home of four Unites Pedagogiques
(teaching units) out of the eight that
presently exist in the Paris area. The old
Beaux-Arts school was dissolved at the
height of the May events of 1968, the end of
a hi story extending back to its foundation
by the Emperor Napoleon the First. Each of
the statements above was made by a former
patron of an atelier in the old school: as the
sentiments themselves show, the teaching
had a unique quality probably not to be seen
again in the lifetime of anyone who reads
this iSSUe.
Under the old atelier system any twenty
students who elected to form an atelier
could do so, studying under a patron of their
own choice - the snag was that the patron
would not necessarily be paid. In this unique
combination of extreme liberality with
almost Byzantine cunning lurks the essence
of the old system. There was no limit to the
duration of the course - it was indeed
perfectly possible to pass a lifetime striving
merely to gain entrance to the school
through the Concours d'Admission One of
the authors of this issue recalls several
students apparently fifty years old still
carrying out the equivalent of third year
studies after twelve or fifteen years - and
that as late as 1958. Progress through the
school was achieved by means of gaining a
number of Unites de Valeur, or 'Mentions.'
government Decree. In 1942 the Ordre des
Architectes was established by which a
government licence to practise was made
obligatory; in May 1968 one of the
revolutionary acts that thrilled the French
architectural profession was the tearing up
of Ordre membership cards.
The old system at the Beaux-Arts
probably achieved its greatest eminence
during the last half of the 19th century after
the dispute between reactionary students
headed by Juli en Guadet and Viollet-le-Duc,
who had been made a professor to
promote a programme of change, over
reforms including a reduction in
the age limit for the Prix de Rome.
This led to the revolt of 1863, after
which (his side having won) Guadet
proceeded to win the prize the following
year. He later became Professor of Theory.
In 1882 one in every four students was a
foreigner and the influence of the school in
the United States alone has been well
enough catalogued to justify its fame. In
1907 there were over I ,000 students in ten
ateliers whereas in 1850 there had been
barely 100 in four. I This global success was
however won at a cost in social relevance
which accelerated as the twentieth century
advanced. In 1750 Blonde! set a programme
for students at the Academy of Architecture
the Royalist predecessor to the Beaux
Arts - of a lighthouse on the sea shore2: as
late at 1967 the same problem was being set
I. SADG Bulletin. No 176
2. L'Arcllitecture d'aujourd'hui, No 143,
April/May 1969
to students uf the BeauxAI ts. Plagiarism
reached unbeltevable depths dunng the late
fifties when (for exampl e) Oscar Niemeyer's
Alvorado Palace at Brazilia would appear
again and again as 'A Court of Justice,' a
'Civic Centre', an 'Opera House' and so on.
Ultimate depths were reached during 1958
with the presentation of a thesis project for
the design of a missile launching station in
whjch the erect intercontinental missiles cast
immaculate shadows. Requirements for a
Diploma consisted of so many square metres
of chassis to be covered with rendered
drawings. Just as Le Corbus1er's famous
designs for the Palace of the League of
Nations were rejected because they were not
drawn in ink - so a project at the
Beaux-Arts could be rejected because it was
'non-geometrical.' Yet, in the end, it was not
so much the manifest and growing absurdity
of this system that brought about its
downfall: rather it was the breakdown of
Malthusian selection itself. Between 1960
and I 967 the number of students in French
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538 AD/9/71
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A Beaux-Arts project of 1965.
Atelier Dengler. The design is for
a world gold reserve bank situated
on an island to the north of
Iceland. The vaults are
noteworthy in viewof the
reported remarks of M Dengler
(see text).
<l
'En Loge' at the old Beaux-Arts.
Students worked individually in
these booths on twelve hour
sketches on which future projects
were based. Despite elaborate
precautions plagiarism became the
rule.
universities .ncreased from 220,000 to
520,000, the number of students of
arcrutecture from 4,000 to 6,000. Both the
and the level of disatisfaction
mcreased m parallel ; worse still the Diplo
became more of a passport to a ma
proletarianized career of draughting
for a salary3 than an admission
ticket to an exclusive club. For this and
other reasons reforms began with the
creation of Groups A, B, C and C I in 1965
- largely as a result of the influence of
Candilis, Josie and Woods who had been
enviegled into teaching by the means
described earlier (more than twenty students
requested their appointment). Group C thus
formed removed itself with Candilis and
Josie to new quarters at the Grand Palais
where it became the centre of progressive
thought at the school. In 1967 Groups C and
Cl abandoned atelier teaching altogether. By
infinitesimal increments such subjects as
housing found their way onto the list of
projects formerly dominated by 'Un salon de
musique,' 'Une maison de garde d'un pare
national', 'La Banque Mondi.ale de /'Or',
'Une piscme c/Jlns un ctub pnve' and so on.
The slow progress via modest demands and
even more modest concessions persisted
until the catacylsm of May 1968.
JJM.tJut
An architecture of technocracy.
Interested in concentration camps? Have a look
at my ZAC (Zone d'habitations .C?'!centres).'
In which blocks of hutments adJOtntJll a
guardroom have been redrawn as blocks of
hutments adjoining a supermarket.
A cartoon in 'eru:AGe7.-vous' 1969.
Paris is now ringed with suburbs of wruch
the infamous Sarcelles is a typical example.
It is now also pricked by massive
and has several new airports. Within the c1ty
massive redevelopment is at work:
dispossessed occupants are for the most part
shipped out to the new suburbs, whence
they must travel in and out daily, and for
which they pay hJgher rents than formerly.
The famous market at Les Hailes is corning
down -it has already moved out to Rungis
on the way to Orly airport. The same
massive coarsening of the grain of
tissue is at work in Paris as in other c1ttes of
the West; the same simplification of social
types; the same erosion of variety; .the same
strangulation by traffic. But in Pans the
3. Henri Lefebvre, La Vie Quotidienne dans le
Monde Moderne, I 967
. ts worse hcnuse France itself ts
watton , .. f h f lh
st. \;d. o 1 t u c
tughl1 !'on over 9,000,000 people live
papu basin and the figure is expected
in to 14,00>,<?00 by the >:ear 2000.
to
10
s no other ctty m France wtth a
\ion of more than one million.