Vient de paraître n° 25 June 2006 CULTURESFRANCE 2 BOOKS CHOSEN AND REVIEWED BY: ARCHITECTURE PHILOSOPHY normale supérieure Jean-Pierre LE DANTEC Sylvie COURTINE-DENAMY Director, École d’architecture Professor, Centre d’histoire Jean-Pierre LUMINET Paris-La Villette moderne et contemporaine des Astrophysicist, Writer Juifs, Judge, Roberval Prize LIVING ARTS EPHE, Sorbonne Pierre-Dominique PARENT HUMAN AND SOCIAL Critic Marc-Olivier PADIS SCIENCES Editor in Chief, Esprit Christian DELACROIX ART Professor, History Michel ENAUDEAU Guy SAMAMA Université de Marne-la-Vallée Critic Professor of Philosophy Yann DIENER Gérard-Georges LEMAIRE POETRY SIHPP, Psychoanalyst Writer, Critic Marc BLANCHET Writer, Critic François DOSSE Olivier MICHELON Professor, Contemporary Critic Yves di MANNO History, Writer, Editor IUFM de Créteil GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS DETECTIVE AND NOIR Patrick GARCIA Jean-Pierre MERCIER NOVELS Professor, Contemporary Specialist Advisor, Collections Aurélien MASSON History, Musée de la Bande dessinée, Editor IUFM de Versailles Angoulême NOVELS AND SHORT Olivier MONGIN FILM FICTION Editor, Esprit Patrick BRION François BUSNEL Writer Director, Film Department, Managing Editor, Lire France 3 Jean-Claude THIVOLLE Thierry GUICHARD Maison des sciences de YOUNG READERS Editor, Matricule des anges l’homme IBBY-France and LA JOIE PAR LES Louise L. LAMBRICHS Éric VIGNE LIVRES Writer, critic Editor CLASSICAL MUSIC Boniface MONGO SPORTS Jean ROY M’BOUSSA Serge LAGET Author, Critique Professor, Writer Journalist, L’Équipe CONTEMPORARY François de SAINT-CHÉRON THEATER MUSIC Professor, Université Paris IV- Jean-Pierre THIBAUDAT (CDs) Sorbonne Writer, Critic, Richard MILLET Special Correspondent Writer Jean-Pierre SALGAS Libération Professor, Critique MUSIC-JAZZ TRAVEL Philippe CARLES SCIENCE Gilles FUMEY Editor in Chief, Jazz Magazine Étienne GUYON Geographer, Professor, Director, Emeritus, l’École Université Paris IV-Sorbonne These selections are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not represent an official position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 3 ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE Selected by Jean-Pierre LE DANTEC LIEBARD Alain and HERDE André (de) Traité d’architecture et d’urbanisme bioclimatiques. Concevoir, édifier et aménager avec le développement durable [A Treatise on Architecture and Bioclimatic Urbanism. Conception, Planning and Construction with Sustainable Development] [Observ’ER/Le Moniteur, March 2006, 776 p.,blackand white and color illustrations +1CD Rom, 85, ISBN: 2-913620-37-X.] • “Sustainable Development” is an ever-increasing influence on architecture and urbanism–and not as a sort of “luxury” in developed countries. At a time when the cost of fossil fuels are escalating due to the exponential growth of demand in the face of limited resources, when climactic equilibrium is threatened, when pollution increases as the planet becomes more and more urban and when inequality deepens between and among populations imperiling peace and security, everyone is becoming more focused on the “three Es” (Economy, ecology and equity) which are the very basis of sustainable development. Of course the development of advanced technologies in this area requires high levels of economic development and social consciousness. But many of the basic principles of bioclimatic architecture and urbanism have been used for centuries in traditional urban constructions and therefore often only require a dose of reasonable thinking and ingenuity to be reinterpreted or reactivated. In addition, by considering bioclimatic costs in terms of “actual global costs” (that is, by integrating all economic variables, including middle- and long- term variables), bioclimatics appear to be extremely affordable economically. Appreciation should thus be directed toward the architect and professor at the Paris-la-Villette ENS of architecture, Alain Liébard, and André Herde, the engineer-architect and professor at Louvain-la-Neuve University. Over the past ten years they have written and now brought together a number of shorter accessible, concrete, practical, hyper- precise and excellently documented works which synthesize every aspect of the current state of a topic which is of interest as much to experienced designers as to people who want to build their houses while respecting the environment. One regret: the clearly instructive nature of the book notwithstanding, coming from architects one would have hoped for more interesting and more color graphic presentations. J.-P.L.D. MANIAQUE Caroline Le Corbusier et les maisons Jaoul. Projets et fabrique. Le Courbusier and the Maisons Jaoul. [Picard, October 2005, 142p., black and white and color illustrations, 38, ISBN: 2-7084-0735-X.] • There’s a simple reason Le Corbusier’s work continues to inspire researchers. Like the work of all great artists, it is much more complex and richer than many historiographic studies make it seem, especially when they reduce it, at least conceptually, to the experimental period between the two wars. While this was the initial period of the architectural and urbanist “manifestos” and can thus seem to be the most dazzling (and also the ones that get most close, if I may say so, to totalitarianism), those of his maturity (after World War II, to be simple) seem to me to be more convincing on other creative and constructive grounds. Without ever breaking with his propheticism, le Corbusier effectively “corrected” the dogmatic aspects of his writings in creations which sometimes seem to contradict his previous statements as, for example, in his Ronchamp “baroque poem” Chapel where he abated (even took the opposite course from) his “poetics of the right angle.” A similar remark can be made about the houses built in Neuilly between 1951 and 1955 4 for the Jaoul family. These are less frequently studied than his villas from the 1930s when he physically affirmed his famous “five points of architecture” (supports, roof gardens, free ground plan design, horizontal windows and free design of the façade) as well as his notion of the “architectural promenade.” But they are as superb as they are exciting–as much in their realization as in their projects and their modes of fabrication. First of all, because Le Corbusier cast off his cloak of the demiurge and built these in continual dialog with the future occupants, the mason, the carpenters, etc. And second, these dialogs, which were associated with a new vernacular (the brick Catalan roof) and international (“brutalism”) style references, led him far afield from his previous postulates: no more supports or long windows, for example, they were based on an architectural desire to be at one with the site while his thoughts were focused most of all on the comfort of future occupants. This is what the book under review brings to our attention in a clear and exciting way. J.-P.L.D. PERRET Auguste Anthologie des écrits, conférences et entretiens [Collected Writings, Lectures and Interviews] [Le Moniteur, April 2006, 474p.,black and white illustrations, 39,ISBN: 2-281-19251-2. Edited by Christophe Laurent, Guy Lambert and Joseph Abram.] • Let me say straight off: I am no fanatical admirer of Auguste Perret (1874-1954). While I admire his role as a pioneer in the use of cement, and more precisely in the invention of a plastic language to express certain qualities of this new material (except when it tends toward the rounded and seaworthy), his so called “rationalist” architecture has always left me cold, as a sort of neo-classicist modern which, in contrast to Picasso or Stravinski, who in their respective creative domains so experimented for a time after the “First War,” he did not know how to question or get beyond himself. Of course, there is also Paul Valéry, who these authors do not fail to refer to. But Valéry, the author of “Graveyard by the Sea” and La Jeune Parque, has a sensual intelligence “Like fruit dissolving in pleasure/in the mouth where death takes form…”) that I do not see in Perret, and whom I see as the heir to Durand more than Boullée or Ledoux. This is most of all because one gets one’s fill of (or one eventually gets nauseous from) the rigorous geometrics of islands and buildings, as in the city center of Le Havre (which was recently classified as a UN world heritage site). But I have to admit that mine is currently a minority viewpoint, and that Perret is making a serious comeback. There are three reasons for this: first, the clear and indisputable architectural and constructed quality of his work; second, the recent and just mentioned classification of Le Havre and its international reevaluation with a concurrent rise in appreciation internationally of Perret’s work; third, the fact that his written and visual archives have been organized and made available to researchers by the Institut Français d’Architecture–which led to this anthology after the superb Les Frères Perret, l’œuvre complète (Paris, IFA-Norma, 2000) and the l’Encyclopédie Perret (Monum/IFA/Le Moniteur, 2002). Perret’s important Contribution à une théorie de l’architecture (the definitive edition of which dates to 1952) as well as an older text edited by his brother-in-law, Sébastien Voirol, on Le style sans ornement (which, although it dates to 1912, bears no relation to Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime,” which Perret detested) are well known but it has been difficult to gauge the scope of the master’s thought through scattered articles, lectures and interviews. The current work will thus become an essential reference which demonstrates, as the editors put it, “once again that architectural writing is not simply a crutch for practice,” but bears witness, like the built work, to thought constructing itself over time. J.-P.L.D. 5 URBANISM Selected by Jean-Pierre LE DANTEC CLAUDE Viviane Faire la ville. Les métiers de l’urbanisme au XXesiècle [City Making; Urbanism Taking Shape in the Twentieth Century] [Parenthèses, “Eupalinos” collection, March 2006, 254p., 18, ISBN: 2-86364-637-0.] SECCHI Bernardo [La Città Europa del XXI secolo: Lezioni di storia urbana] Première leçon d’urbanisme [Urbanism, Lesson One] [Parenthèses, “Eupalinos” collection, January 2006, 158p.,12, ISBN: 2-86364-635-4.