Conference by Jean-Louis Violeau, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes
Date: Tuesday, March 11th at 5:30 pm.
Location: Amphitheatre 1120, Faculté de l’aménagement, Université de Montréal
Lecture series of the Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle
Architecture and its (Single) Users as Seen by Sociologist and Philosopher Jean Baudrillard
Summary:
How does one go about exploring Jean Baudrillard’s intimate yet suspicious relationship with architecture? One begins, as one should, with Disney, moves on to the duck and the Venturis, stops at the figure of the (architectural) monster, moves on to Jean Nouvel and the ambiguities of transparency, and finally arrives at some contemporary projects, notably the highly condemned Europacity. Along the way, Baudrillard raises two questions: what has become of architectural postmodernism, and the persistence of the notion of the author in architecture. Baudrillard was more of an imaginary sociologist, intuitive and detached, an interpreter who amused himself by drawing the dotted lines of the present, overdoing it and regularly tending to paroxysms. Hence his interest in architectures that resist interpretation and seem to take on a life of their own, as if detached from their designers: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Biosphère II project, the Beaubourg, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and some of Jean Nouvel’s architecture. Behind the scenes: obscure and ironic, every stage has its backstage, every scene is reversible, every project calls for its counter-project. The cursed part always bides its time. Culture for Beaubourg, globalization for the WTC, the planet for Biosphère II, the commodification of cities for the Guggenheim Bilbao… The ambivalence grows as these projects strive to saturate reality. What all these untamed concretions have in common, however, is that they seek first and foremost to bring the edge of difference to bear on generalized equivalence. In an age of no-fake and a shared quest for authenticity, this sociological perspective is meeting with renewed interest, particularly in the ambivalent choices and behaviors of digital children.
The sociologist Jean-Louis Violeau is a professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes and at the Urban School of Sciences Po Paris. He is a researcher at CRENAU (CNRS UMR AAU).
He is a regular contributor to architectural magazines, in particular AMC-Le Moniteur architecture and L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, as well as more general magazines such as Esprit, Place Publique Nantes-Saint-Nazaire and Urbanisme. He is also a member of the editorial board of the latter two magazines.
His dissertation Les architectes et mai 68 was published in 2005 by Recherches, the distant heirs of the journal of the same name founded under the aegis of Félix Guattari and the CERFI. The sequel, his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) on Les architectes et mai 81, was published by Recherches in 2011.
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