La critique à l’œuvre. Fragments d’un discours architectural
Edited by Denis Bilodeau and Louis Martin
Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2025
The current environmental crisis confronts architects with the need to redefine their ethical positions, giving a renewed role to architectural criticism. But this link between crisis and criticism, beyond a common etymology, remains equivocal. Does criticism react to crises, or does it provoke them? Do the internal crises that regularly plague criticism coincide with those affecting architecture, its institutions and, more broadly, society? Is the purpose of criticism to act within the disciplinary boundaries of architecture or, on the contrary, to mediate the worlds it is supposed to transform? Can architecture itself arm itself with critical potential? These recurring questions, which have accompanied the development of modern and postmodern architecture, now have a long history that the present collection helps to illuminate. Stemming from a number of symposia, study days and research projects, the investigations it brings together detail certain episodes or key players on both sides of the Atlantic, from Bruno Zevi to Reyner Banham, via Alexander Tzonis and Kenneth Frampton.
With contributions from:
- Georges Adamczyk
- Paolo Amaldi
- Jean-Pierre Chupin
- Carmela Cucuzzella
- Bechara Helal
- Rainier Hoddé
- Hélène Jannière
- Jonathan Lachance
- Réjean Legault
- David Theodore
- Estelle Thibault
