The symposium entitled “1989, hors-champ de l’architecture officielle. Des petits mondes au Grand” is organized by the ACS, Architecture, Culture Société/UMR AUSser 3329 Laboratory and will be held on 27 and 28 November at ENSA, Paris Malaquais.
The team is asking for contributions from researchers, teachers and practitioners in architecture and in social sciences. Proposed communications should be submitted by 29 June 2020. Bellow is the call for communications and its practical arrangements.
For the symposium to take place in the best possible conditions, it may be postponed in the view of the current health situation.
Context and objectives
Every year is a key year. In each step of time, something is accomplished. Each past, present or future moment features a major event, but one only has to change one’s viewpoint for such a moment to gain or lose importance, and for another “minor” or even trivial moment to become fundamental for historians. With this hypothesis in mind, we have chosen to assign the year 1989 a twofold role, namely a pretext and a landmark to try and establish an architectural archaeology of the present day. Our investigation, which we could have called “history of the present day”, started with France and gradually extended to international outlooks.
On a global geopolitical scale, 1989 saw the end of the confrontation between the West and the Eastern
blocks, the collapse of communism, industrial redeployments heralding globalization, the premises of the Gulf War, new borders being drawn, the consolidation of ecological concerns after the Chernobyl disaster… In France, the bicentenary celebrations of the Revolution dominated the media. In the field of architecture, they echoed the presidential “major infrastructure projects”, the showcase facilities wanted by François Mitterrand, which would be inaugurated one year after he was re-elected for a second term. While the history of official architecture tends to focus only on “major events” that hog the limelight, we actually wanted to “look elsewhere” and focus on facts too quickly regarded as secondary and therefore no doubt forgotten all too soon. At times, something that went virtually unnoticed at the time turns out to be founding.
Ambition may seem modest in its objects, but it is bold in its objectives. Surveys conducted behind the
scenes and the backgrounds to official history offer unexpected outlooks on the architectural field, which will not fail to confront us with the heritage of modernity, post-modernity and soon super-modernity. Finally, when speaking about architecture, how can one ignore not just the multiple scales – design, interiors, buildings, neighbourhoods, towns and cities, territories, landscapes – but more importantly the various different fields – the economy, technical matters, art, politics, sociology, ecology, digital – with which it interacts?
The “highlight events” that featured centre-stage in France in 1989 under the aegis of an all-powerful
town-and-country-planner State, which arguably demonstrated its power in Paris for the last time with the construction of the Pyramide du Louvre, the Grande Arche de la Défense and the Opéra Bastille, overshadowed innumerable lower-profile events that got little media coverage. And yet, the latter shed just as much light, if not more, on that period of history and its effects on the world of today.
Tendencies
The 1989 symposium marks the culmination of a group project led by the ACS-UMR AUSser 3329
laboratory since 2017. Several themes were explored, their subjects overlapping: the redistribution of roles between the State, local authorities and the private-sector; transformations in housing; upheavals in the teaching of architecture; the growing acknowledgement of ecological challenges; the consequences of political shifts in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin.
The researchers coalesced around three major topics:
– Housing
As major public facilities of national dimensions are in the limelight, housing programmes with their domestic scale and sites scattered nationwide are sometimes overlooked. And yet, since 1981, the Banlieues 89 association has taken on the mission of rehabilitating visibly suffering suburbs. Questions are raised, experiments are carried out. The talk is of innovation, the involvement of local residents, flexible uses, new ways of inhabiting, types of intermediaries, urban forms, sometimes even self-builds…
– Culture, education, media coverage
In 1989, the teaching of architecture was faced with issues such as devolution, opening up to Europe, the
rapid development of ecology, closer ties with universities, the institutionalization of research or even the emergence of new communication technologies. What roles do architecture schools play as public-sector institutions in response to such developments? And in parallel, communication is becoming a key challenge for the profession, which needs to find strategies for being in the media limelight.
– Globalization, completion, incompletion
As we have seen, the world order underwent numerous upheavals around 1989. Beyond geopolitical and
economic phenomena, which have undermined notions such as borders, we think of the crisis afflicting thinking about modernity or the emergence of the worldwide web. How do these new orders – be they philosophical, cultural, political or even military – influence the theory and practice of architecture?
Lines of thinking
These themes (housing – education, mediation, culture – globalization, completion and incompletion) provide input for the lines of inquiry that the proposed communications should follow:
1. New players, new remits
With the redistribution of roles between the State, local authorities and the private-sector and the increasing permeability between these spheres, how are decision-making processes changing?
New players (project ownership or management professionals, associations of users, not forgetting teachers, researchers, communicators, cultural mediators, etc.) from the world of architecture and construction are appearing. How do they seek to brand themselves in relation to one another?
2. New concerns, new tools
How are the architectural ideals of the time accounted for in the transformations that housing is undergoing? Upheavals in the teaching of architecture; what are the new strong points?
Are ecological concerns and messages giving rise to clearly identifiable professional and militant stances,
both in the theory and in practice?
The emergence of the digital world is progressively disrupting the building industry but also design modes or even forms: how are architects appropriating (or refusing to appropriate) computers and the Internet?
3. New scales, new stakes
With Europe under construction, are the multifarious forms of globalization creating new orders?
With regard to architectural and urban, constructed and spatial form, what are the implications of political, social, economic and cultural changes in terms of aesthetics, language, models, identity(ies)?
To know more details about the International symposium, click here.
Download the call for commucications:
1989_AAC_ENG
1989_AAC_FRA