Papers by Olivier Gahinet
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 1, 1999
Ce travail de recherche porte sur un exercice du groupe Uno, "le 30x30".
Uno est un groupe d'ens... more Ce travail de recherche porte sur un exercice du groupe Uno, "le 30x30".
Uno est un groupe d'enseignants du projet architectural créé en 1979 et actif jusqu'en 2004. Il a été fondé par Henri Ciriani, Jean-Patrick Fortin, Edith Girard et Claude Vié, rejoints plus tard par Laurent Salomon, Alain Dervieux, Laurent Beaudouin et Olivier Gahinet.
Le 30x30 est un exercice de troisième année, qui a pour objectif de faire découvrir aux étudiants l’espace moderne : un espace à la fois social et physique, un espace libre et libérateur né de la disparition des contraintes structurelles. Cet apprentissage de l’espace moderne passe par celui du plan libre, pour installer des programmes variés dans un espace unitaire et installer au dedans la liberté du dehors.
Cette recherche présente également l'ensemble du cursus Uno, de la deuxième à la cinquième année.
This research focuses on an exercise by the Uno group, the "30x30". Uno is a group of teachers of architecture created in 1979 and active until 2004. It was founded by Henri Ciriani, Jean-Patrick Fortin, Edith Girard and Claude Vié, later joined by Laurent Salomon, Alain Dervieux, Laurent Beaudouin and Olivier Gahinet. The 30x30 is a third year exercise, which aims to introduce students to modern space: a space that is both social and physical, a free and liberating space born from the disappearance of structural constraints. Learning modern space involves learning the free plane, in order to install various programs in a unitary space and to put insid the freedom from the outside. This research also presents the entire Uno curriculum, from the second to the fifth year.
Bulletin n°56 de la Société Française des Architectes - l'enseignement du projet en danger - pp 67-70, 2020
Qu'est ce qui menace l'enseignement du projet architectural? Que pourrait être un doctorat en arc... more Qu'est ce qui menace l'enseignement du projet architectural? Que pourrait être un doctorat en architecture? La recherche en architecture existe-t-elle? La connaissance architecturale est-elle scientifique? Toutes les réponses à ces questions et à bien d'autres dans cet article définitif!
Le Visiteur n°26, 2021
Architecture, like painting, entails non-verbal knowledge. That shouldn’t prevent writers from di... more Architecture, like painting, entails non-verbal knowledge. That shouldn’t prevent writers from discussing it, but they usually prefer to talk about painting, which is a fairly “private” art, rather than architecture, even though the latter is “public.” Ironically, this lack of interest helps us to understand architecture. There is something very specific about it that resists language, commentary, and elucidation—it cannot be glossed. This something, which remains after all has been said, is the true skill of architects, their “projective” knowledge. Like painters, architects converse with each other over the centuries. This conversation helps us to define projective knowledge. In so doing this essay will retrace the projective fate—analogous to the critical fate—of a project for which there survive only poor photos of two lost drawings, namely Mies van der Rohe’s 1923 design of a brick house. It will simultaneously attempt to answer the highly important question asked by every architect who has designed a house: where do the bedrooms go?
Le Visiteur n°25, 2020
Whereas the qualities of many contemporary houses being published today derive from their setting... more Whereas the qualities of many contemporary houses being published today derive from their setting in an outstanding landscape, some architects continue to design houses for sites “without qualities.” The beauty of these houses is found within. Such is the case of the one Nicolás Campodonico has just completed in Rosario. It constitutes the latest variation on a form that can be recognized in architecture from the Renaissance as well as from the heroic modernist period. Tracing the history of this form means sketching a projective history of architecture, a history that belongs not to history teachers but to architects. The important thing is not that it be true, but that it help us to understand—and to implement—projective design.
Le Visiteur n°24, 2019
“Some people have such a vague idea of poetry that they take vagueness for poetry itself.” Paul V... more “Some people have such a vague idea of poetry that they take vagueness for poetry itself.” Paul Valéry’s quip applies to cities as well as poetry, and the vocabulary of architecture and town planning is rich in words used all the more for being vague in meaning, such as “landscape” and “metropolis.” The same is true of “public space.” We know what it is not: it is not the town surveyor’s “public domain,” nor is it the “public highway” of police, prostitutes, and drunks. Saying what it actually is, however, is trickier. It seems to be attached to the idea we have of European cities, allegedly being a positive, fragile, and threatened component of them. It even seems to me that it has been linked to a specific urban realm, namely “cities of stone.” Which might suggest that other cities lack public spaces.
By studying both Holland’s golden age and the city of Paris, we shall see that this “European” public space is singular version of public space understood in a broader sense, an “impalpable space” that explains the urban quality of cities as different as Tokyo, Los Angeles, and São Paulo.
Le Visiteur n°22, 2017
In 1886, in "Beyond Good and Evil", Nietzsche wrote, “It is too bad! Always the old story! When a... more In 1886, in "Beyond Good and Evil", Nietzsche wrote, “It is too bad! Always the old story! When a man has finished building his house, he finds that he has learnt unawares something which he ought absolutely to have known before he began to build. The eternal, fatal ‘Too late!’ The melancholia of everything completed!”
Architects, however, anticipate. That is their job—they project. Which is what Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (born one year after the publication of Nietzsche’s text) did in 1914 when he invented a system of concrete frameworks that would facilitate the mass production of inexpensive housing. This system, which he dubbed Dom-ino, would be published in 1930 in the first volume of his complete works, Œuvre complète. The man who became known as Le Corbusier wrote that the system waited fifteen years until it was finally applied in his proposal for so-called Loucheur housing (1929).
In fact, the outline of the Dom-ino framework—the drawing that opens the first volume of Œuvre complète—would receive great critical attention from architectural historians. For every subsequent purist design it represented what “ought absolutely be known before beginning to build,” to paraphrase Nietzsche. As discussed her, while purist projects explored the issues raised by Dom-ino, they went far beyond its basic framework. It took Le Corbusier a long time to explore it fully, and only after the Second World War, with Villa Shodhan, would he manage to go beyond it by literally rising above it. In the meantime, Le Corbusier demonstrated how an architect can take a good look at his own projects and, above all, see them.
L'exigence de Justice: a tribute to Robert Badinter, 2016
a note about the architecure of prisons and the evolution of their plan.
Le Visiteur n°21, 2015
Since the beginning of modernity (which like Panofsky, we will date to “when Goethe died”), two a... more Since the beginning of modernity (which like Panofsky, we will date to “when Goethe died”), two apparently contradictory tendencies have coexisted within architecture: the first sees the project as a way of transforming the world; the second aims for permanence. On one side, the will to transform; on the other, the desire to last. When a synthesis is made between the two, it will result in places that are out of time, seeming to be available forever and capable of housing the nostalgias of the future. This modernity was constructed in relation to the industrial revolution. Today, a new revolution is needed: one that would accompany the necessary “loosening” of man’s grip on Earth (the fight against climate change being one aspect of this); one that would leave our fellow occupants of this planet their own space; one that would restore man’s dignity and self-sovereignty.
The question will be, what “architecture of parsimony” could accompany this future revolution, and what spaces could, in turn, be the places of future memories, so as to continue the modern adventure by inhabiting – at last – time.
Le Visiteur n°20, 2015
Typology, the art of laying out housing, constitutes a kind of architectural theory of neighborli... more Typology, the art of laying out housing, constitutes a kind of architectural theory of neighborliness and ways of living together. If one reason why the refinements that it allows have virtually disappeared from today’s collective housing is to be found in regulations (shrinking surface dimensions and “disabled” norms, for example), this factor from “outside” the discipline has only dealt the final blow to an art that was already neglected. At the same time, we can see that the urban forms of the neoliberal city are, behind their superficial variety, very limited.
To understand this typological and morphological impoverishment, I shall analyze the relations between types of housing and urban forms in recent history. I will highlight the connection between all the great modern experiments in collective housing by considering a number of the archetypes to which most housing types can be related: the construction of a view over the city from the home, the distancing of the world, and the creation of a protected gaze that is the foundation of the very notion of dwelling.
Grief, 2014
Examining the characteristics of courthouse as a program, to answer the question: what should be ... more Examining the characteristics of courthouse as a program, to answer the question: what should be a modern courthouse?
Published in the first issue of Grief, the law review of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
There is a connection between modern architecture and democracy, a connection that will be discus... more There is a connection between modern architecture and democracy, a connection that will be discussed here the better to understand, embrace, and introduce it into contemporary architecture.
Exploring the relationship between modern architecture and democracy means pursuing an idea raised a century ago by Frank Lloyd Wright. It also means wondering how architecture can be political today or, more precisely, how architects can contribute, with their specific skills, to a transformation of society. The most radical approach today would probably require building on – so to speak – the advice notably given by Guy Debord, followed by Manfredo Tafuri: Don’t Build.
But that may not be the only answer.
In contrast to today’s "all-enclosing" architecture, we must continue to propose buildings that make it possible to live with and contribute to the city. And we must also ask how today’s architecture might speak to a better world, one that adopts fraternity as an ideal. This article will proceed by examining several examples in the history of architecture of spaces and buildings that symbolize freedom and life in society, and will suggest several paths toward to a truly democratic architecture. The latter does not refer to "architecture in a democracy" (some totalitarian societies have produced democratic buildings) nor to some kind of participatory architecture. Instead, the definition of what is called a democratic building involves an edifice that transcends its purpose in order to embody the participation of all citizens in the life of their city.
Visiting Paris in the 1920s, Prokofiev said of the French composers of the time that “only Ravel ... more Visiting Paris in the 1920s, Prokofiev said of the French composers of the time that “only Ravel knows what he is doing.” To know what we are doing: this is perhaps the primary aim of a theory of architecture: a theory of practice, in short, to borrow what Pierre Bourdieu said of sociology. At a time when the world is in crisis - economically, socially, culturally, and ecologically - and the most prominent architectural work chimes in with its own trivialities, it is more necessary than ever to “know what we are doing” and to master the meaning of form. Asking - and answering - theoretical questions ought to help us in this respect. We offer here an episode from the projectual history of architecture, or rather of an analysis that became a project, in order to compare the issues affecting the project today to those that affected it in the past. We will examine the “projectual career” of one of the subjects that runs all through the history of modern architecture: pilotis and their related features, that is the uplifted structure and the underside. Among the “five points” proposed by Le Corbusier, the pilotis have always seemed to occupy a position that is theoretical rather than practically convincing; in reality they often create a space that is difficult to characterize. At the end of his life, Le Corbusier was to return to this issue, with several projects that focused more on the underside than on the pilotis themselves. We show how in these projects, in which he seemed to be initiating a new “manner,” the underside becomes the locus of representation and status, and how Le Corbusier’s thinking offers a way to deal with a question that affects the whole of modernity and is today more relevant than ever: how can we give a building at once stature, individual identity, and function?
Designing a building for the center of Toledo to house the municipal archives meant implementing ... more Designing a building for the center of Toledo to house the municipal archives meant implementing a major, high-value project for the city, but one that few actually visit except for scholars and sightseers. It was, in a sense, to be a public building without a public. This paradox was to nurture the project in several ways: in the way the building presents itself to the surrounding city, the way visitors enter it, and in the character of its interior spaces.
In the world of architecture and beyond, Rem Koolhaas enjoys a major and unique reputation. He is... more In the world of architecture and beyond, Rem Koolhaas enjoys a major and unique reputation. He is permanently on the list of those invited to participate in international competitions large and small. He has published several books, all of which have had considerable success. In Beijing he is completing the construction of one of the biggest buildings in the world, while at the same time he is the representative par excellence of the avant-garde, his every project met with eager anticipation and cries of astonishment. His projects, whether actually built or not, have marked contemporary architecture for the last thirty years. His fellow-architects, even those who have achieved the most in terms of reputation and clients, do not flaunt the same aura of universal adulation: we all know critics, architects, or architecture buffs who claim that Zaha Hadid is an "artist" who keeps producing too many mediocre copies of the exact same building, that Herzog and de Meuron have turned into insulation salesmen, that Jean Nouvel builds much too fast and would do better to build better, that all four of them ought to let a bit more light into their buildings. But Rem Koolhaas enjoys an unblemished reputation as an intellectual and a builder at the same time, so mighty a reputation that most of those who write about architecture take him as a their point of departure. This unanimity is not in and of itself suspicious: it is always possible that Rem Koolhaas is indeed the great architect who figures in the most widely read critical discussions. But it is equally possible that RK is a symptom, that of a redistribution of forces within the triangle formed by the architect, the client, and the critic, and more generally between the realms of architecture and economics...
Talks by Olivier Gahinet
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Papers by Olivier Gahinet
Uno est un groupe d'enseignants du projet architectural créé en 1979 et actif jusqu'en 2004. Il a été fondé par Henri Ciriani, Jean-Patrick Fortin, Edith Girard et Claude Vié, rejoints plus tard par Laurent Salomon, Alain Dervieux, Laurent Beaudouin et Olivier Gahinet.
Le 30x30 est un exercice de troisième année, qui a pour objectif de faire découvrir aux étudiants l’espace moderne : un espace à la fois social et physique, un espace libre et libérateur né de la disparition des contraintes structurelles. Cet apprentissage de l’espace moderne passe par celui du plan libre, pour installer des programmes variés dans un espace unitaire et installer au dedans la liberté du dehors.
Cette recherche présente également l'ensemble du cursus Uno, de la deuxième à la cinquième année.
This research focuses on an exercise by the Uno group, the "30x30". Uno is a group of teachers of architecture created in 1979 and active until 2004. It was founded by Henri Ciriani, Jean-Patrick Fortin, Edith Girard and Claude Vié, later joined by Laurent Salomon, Alain Dervieux, Laurent Beaudouin and Olivier Gahinet. The 30x30 is a third year exercise, which aims to introduce students to modern space: a space that is both social and physical, a free and liberating space born from the disappearance of structural constraints. Learning modern space involves learning the free plane, in order to install various programs in a unitary space and to put insid the freedom from the outside. This research also presents the entire Uno curriculum, from the second to the fifth year.
By studying both Holland’s golden age and the city of Paris, we shall see that this “European” public space is singular version of public space understood in a broader sense, an “impalpable space” that explains the urban quality of cities as different as Tokyo, Los Angeles, and São Paulo.
Architects, however, anticipate. That is their job—they project. Which is what Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (born one year after the publication of Nietzsche’s text) did in 1914 when he invented a system of concrete frameworks that would facilitate the mass production of inexpensive housing. This system, which he dubbed Dom-ino, would be published in 1930 in the first volume of his complete works, Œuvre complète. The man who became known as Le Corbusier wrote that the system waited fifteen years until it was finally applied in his proposal for so-called Loucheur housing (1929).
In fact, the outline of the Dom-ino framework—the drawing that opens the first volume of Œuvre complète—would receive great critical attention from architectural historians. For every subsequent purist design it represented what “ought absolutely be known before beginning to build,” to paraphrase Nietzsche. As discussed her, while purist projects explored the issues raised by Dom-ino, they went far beyond its basic framework. It took Le Corbusier a long time to explore it fully, and only after the Second World War, with Villa Shodhan, would he manage to go beyond it by literally rising above it. In the meantime, Le Corbusier demonstrated how an architect can take a good look at his own projects and, above all, see them.
The question will be, what “architecture of parsimony” could accompany this future revolution, and what spaces could, in turn, be the places of future memories, so as to continue the modern adventure by inhabiting – at last – time.
To understand this typological and morphological impoverishment, I shall analyze the relations between types of housing and urban forms in recent history. I will highlight the connection between all the great modern experiments in collective housing by considering a number of the archetypes to which most housing types can be related: the construction of a view over the city from the home, the distancing of the world, and the creation of a protected gaze that is the foundation of the very notion of dwelling.
Published in the first issue of Grief, the law review of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Exploring the relationship between modern architecture and democracy means pursuing an idea raised a century ago by Frank Lloyd Wright. It also means wondering how architecture can be political today or, more precisely, how architects can contribute, with their specific skills, to a transformation of society. The most radical approach today would probably require building on – so to speak – the advice notably given by Guy Debord, followed by Manfredo Tafuri: Don’t Build.
But that may not be the only answer.
In contrast to today’s "all-enclosing" architecture, we must continue to propose buildings that make it possible to live with and contribute to the city. And we must also ask how today’s architecture might speak to a better world, one that adopts fraternity as an ideal. This article will proceed by examining several examples in the history of architecture of spaces and buildings that symbolize freedom and life in society, and will suggest several paths toward to a truly democratic architecture. The latter does not refer to "architecture in a democracy" (some totalitarian societies have produced democratic buildings) nor to some kind of participatory architecture. Instead, the definition of what is called a democratic building involves an edifice that transcends its purpose in order to embody the participation of all citizens in the life of their city.
Talks by Olivier Gahinet
Uno est un groupe d'enseignants du projet architectural créé en 1979 et actif jusqu'en 2004. Il a été fondé par Henri Ciriani, Jean-Patrick Fortin, Edith Girard et Claude Vié, rejoints plus tard par Laurent Salomon, Alain Dervieux, Laurent Beaudouin et Olivier Gahinet.
Le 30x30 est un exercice de troisième année, qui a pour objectif de faire découvrir aux étudiants l’espace moderne : un espace à la fois social et physique, un espace libre et libérateur né de la disparition des contraintes structurelles. Cet apprentissage de l’espace moderne passe par celui du plan libre, pour installer des programmes variés dans un espace unitaire et installer au dedans la liberté du dehors.
Cette recherche présente également l'ensemble du cursus Uno, de la deuxième à la cinquième année.
This research focuses on an exercise by the Uno group, the "30x30". Uno is a group of teachers of architecture created in 1979 and active until 2004. It was founded by Henri Ciriani, Jean-Patrick Fortin, Edith Girard and Claude Vié, later joined by Laurent Salomon, Alain Dervieux, Laurent Beaudouin and Olivier Gahinet. The 30x30 is a third year exercise, which aims to introduce students to modern space: a space that is both social and physical, a free and liberating space born from the disappearance of structural constraints. Learning modern space involves learning the free plane, in order to install various programs in a unitary space and to put insid the freedom from the outside. This research also presents the entire Uno curriculum, from the second to the fifth year.
By studying both Holland’s golden age and the city of Paris, we shall see that this “European” public space is singular version of public space understood in a broader sense, an “impalpable space” that explains the urban quality of cities as different as Tokyo, Los Angeles, and São Paulo.
Architects, however, anticipate. That is their job—they project. Which is what Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (born one year after the publication of Nietzsche’s text) did in 1914 when he invented a system of concrete frameworks that would facilitate the mass production of inexpensive housing. This system, which he dubbed Dom-ino, would be published in 1930 in the first volume of his complete works, Œuvre complète. The man who became known as Le Corbusier wrote that the system waited fifteen years until it was finally applied in his proposal for so-called Loucheur housing (1929).
In fact, the outline of the Dom-ino framework—the drawing that opens the first volume of Œuvre complète—would receive great critical attention from architectural historians. For every subsequent purist design it represented what “ought absolutely be known before beginning to build,” to paraphrase Nietzsche. As discussed her, while purist projects explored the issues raised by Dom-ino, they went far beyond its basic framework. It took Le Corbusier a long time to explore it fully, and only after the Second World War, with Villa Shodhan, would he manage to go beyond it by literally rising above it. In the meantime, Le Corbusier demonstrated how an architect can take a good look at his own projects and, above all, see them.
The question will be, what “architecture of parsimony” could accompany this future revolution, and what spaces could, in turn, be the places of future memories, so as to continue the modern adventure by inhabiting – at last – time.
To understand this typological and morphological impoverishment, I shall analyze the relations between types of housing and urban forms in recent history. I will highlight the connection between all the great modern experiments in collective housing by considering a number of the archetypes to which most housing types can be related: the construction of a view over the city from the home, the distancing of the world, and the creation of a protected gaze that is the foundation of the very notion of dwelling.
Published in the first issue of Grief, the law review of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Exploring the relationship between modern architecture and democracy means pursuing an idea raised a century ago by Frank Lloyd Wright. It also means wondering how architecture can be political today or, more precisely, how architects can contribute, with their specific skills, to a transformation of society. The most radical approach today would probably require building on – so to speak – the advice notably given by Guy Debord, followed by Manfredo Tafuri: Don’t Build.
But that may not be the only answer.
In contrast to today’s "all-enclosing" architecture, we must continue to propose buildings that make it possible to live with and contribute to the city. And we must also ask how today’s architecture might speak to a better world, one that adopts fraternity as an ideal. This article will proceed by examining several examples in the history of architecture of spaces and buildings that symbolize freedom and life in society, and will suggest several paths toward to a truly democratic architecture. The latter does not refer to "architecture in a democracy" (some totalitarian societies have produced democratic buildings) nor to some kind of participatory architecture. Instead, the definition of what is called a democratic building involves an edifice that transcends its purpose in order to embody the participation of all citizens in the life of their city.