Date: 31 January 2023, 5.30 pm. Venue: Amphitheatre 1120, Faculty of Planning, Université de Montréal. To mark the 2022 publication of L’architecture en ses écoles, an encyclopaedia, we are delighted to welcome Daniel Le Couédic, architect and historian, professor at the University of Western Brittany, and co-editor of the volume. Hosted by Lucie K. Morisset, a professor at UQAM and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage, this lecture and discussion will also bring together two Quebec-based contributors to the encyclopaedia: François Giraldeau, honorary professor at the UQAM School of Design, and Jean-Pierre Chupin, professor at the UdeM School of Architecture and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Competitions and Mediation of Excellence,
· Anne-Marie Châtelet, Amandine Diener, Marie-Jeanne Dumont and Daniel Le Couédic (eds.), L’architecture en ses écoles (an encyclopaedia of architectural education in the 20th century), Châteaulin, Éditions Locus Solus, 2022.
· Jean-Pierre Chupin and François Giraldeau, article ‘Québec, relations and exchanges’, p. 568.
Abstract
With its 704 pages and 341 entries written by 147 authors, this volume is the result of a vast collective effort to compile and explore, in a way never seen before, a body of knowledge that had previously been fragmented. This history of architectural education in France during the 20th century addresses a range of dimensions – pedagogical, professional, regional, political, institutional and material – and covers a spectrum of institutions involved in architectural training, such as engineering schools. In France, the history of architectural education was long reduced to its supposed shortcomings and to the narrative of the battle that the champions of modernity were said to have waged against the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The upheaval of 1968 buried even the memory of that bygone era. The revival came from the United States, where the École had once enjoyed great prestige, but initially concerned only the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1980s that the complexity of the issues debated and experimented with in the 20th century began to be shed light upon and, above all, that investigations into architecture, its teaching, the profession and its practice were brought into relation with one another. As part of this movement, there was a rediscovery of the long and heated debate between architects defending the Parisian monopoly and their colleagues in the provinces, which had preceded the establishment of the first regional schools in 1903. The Rennes Regional School of Architecture — which became the Brittany Regional School of Architecture in 1984 — was the second to open its doors; its history therefore provides an insight into every stage of this bumpy journey which, far beyond the realm of architecture, sheds light on the reinvention of higher education in France and on the role it has played ever since in shaping the national landscape. The discussion will also draw on another book by our guest: Daniel Couédic and André Sauvage, The Brittany School of Architecture: A Century of Architect-Making, Châteaulin, Locus Solus, 2022.