Big, Heavy, Beautiful | Paris 14e, France, 2007 | 28 000m2 / 98 000m3

Eugène Hénard was not the same kind of futurist as F.T. Marinetti, but he helped us see the future for at least a few minutes in June 2007 when we won a competition to design a bus maintenance centre with 180 public housing units and a day-care facility above it. The visionary section of a "future street" that Hénard had imagined would be realised... In Paris, the substratum of the city is extremely dense - the metro, RER, RATP bus depots, the subterranean infrastructure of Les Halles all occupy it. This functional density of underground Paris is as necessary to the life of the city as the residential density of its noble buildings above ground... The basement level of the 14th arrondissement of Paris must have been extremely popular with sculptors who worked with plaster of Paris. It resembles a gigantic, empty hole with tunnels and reservoirs running through it. In this area of the city, every new building must first consolidate the ground beneath it, as had to be done in 1932 for the construction of Le Corbusier's Pavillon Suisse at the Cité Universitaire...We are consolidating our ground with the underground levels that house the bus garage, parking, and other RATP maintenance services. The chance to use public transport as the foundation of our building is extremely exciting. How can we superimpose Le Corbusier's trois établissements humains - live, work, leisure?

BIG! BAD? MODERN:

The Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture will throughout the 2010-11 academic year debate and suggest new ideas in order to revisit the cultural heritage of modernism, its built and un-built utopias.

Modernism has produced some of the largest single buildings of our times.

Today architects continue to speak of their achievements in terms of size and square meters. City developments are measured in hectares and acres, when concerning emerging economies even in square kilometres.

Le Corbusier's allegorical ocean liner became the normative and even litteral reference in many debates on the city and its architecture. Megastructures, as autonomous systems of dense living, working and existence became the basis of many architectural theses. The metabolists, the archigram group, the situationists and many other thinkers/architects such as Rossi and perhaps to the present time Koolhaas have described through various models the potential of projecting in cities.

The lecture series BIG! BAD? MODERN: will explore the Modernist belief in architecture's capacity to absorb the city scale. It will do so by presenting various speakers who are addressing the issue from different foci.

Nasrine Seraji | Head of Institute

11.04.2011 | Lecture Stefan Gruber
09.05.2011 | Lecture Kalliope Kontozoglou
23.05.2011 | Lecture Sabine Kraft
June 2011 | Lecture Peter Leeb

www.akbild.ac.at/ika