PLUS. Large scale housing development. An exceptional case.

In France an important public program is being mounted to deconstruct the high-rise housing estates from the 1960s and 70s (demolition / reconstruction on a one-to-one basis), thus expressing a strong will to transform the image of the city. At the same time an important deficit is observed of public housing, one which would, on the contrary, call for an increase and an acceleration in building terms.

In this context, we consider that demolition is aberrant and that transformation would permit one to respond to needs in a more economic, more effective and more qualitative way.

While today the high-rise estates present housing conditions that are in most of the cases unsatisfactory and inadequate, we are nevertheless convinced that a potential for quality remains associated with them.
More often than not the structural, geographic and spatial potential of these great buildings is a valuable point of departure for radically improving current housing conditions.

To offer flats that have twice the surface area and are bathed in natural light, to offer diversified, non-standard typologies, service and usage facilities, and to consider the quality of the interiors and the communal spaces as prior to urban quality are today's objectives.

Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal, architects

Built and Un-built Utopias - The Politics of Conversions

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 Built and Un-built Utopias 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. Architects re-formulating Modernism's legacy, filmmakers documenting its failure and success, academics re-thinking city scale architecture, landscape architects re-generating abandoned and dilapidated infrastructures.

The Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture will throughout the 2010-11 academic year debate and suggest new ideas in order torevisit the cultural heritage of modernism, its Built and Un-built Utopias.