Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970

by Larry Busbea
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007
320 pp. Illus, 37 b/w. Trade, $24.95 ( £15.95)
ISBN: 978-0-262-02611-6.

Reviewed by Jennifer Ferng
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

jferng@mit.edu

Bobigny, La Courneuve, and Sarcelles, as well as other planning projects such as Maine-Montparnasse and La Défense, constitute some of the grand ensembles constructed in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s that scholars have examined in order to understand the effects of national identity and political regionalism on the French urban landscape. Regulated by the administrative policies during Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, these housing prototypes of the Fifth Republic transformed the Parisian periphery into a series of “dormitory cities” composed of habitations à loyer modéré (HLMS), plunging what was to be ordered reconstruction into contentious social and economic problems. Topologies is another notable volume that contributes to the widening body of literature on postwar architectural history that reinterprets the technological thinking of French utopian architects, along with those such as Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, the Metabolists, Cedric Price, and Team 10, who collectively foresaw the dawning of a new age, tempered not by revolution but by the scientific techniques gained from economics and the social sciences. The book provides detailed biographical information on the work of David Georges Emmerich, Yona Friedman, Claude Parent, and Michel Ragon while contextualizing their building schemes of three-dimensional space frames and networked agglomerations against the ideas of well-known theorists Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Johannes Huzinga, and Paul Virilio, whose thoughts on consumer society, space, play, and the body, respectively, inspired these architects’ visions of the evolving city.

Despite other studies that have emphasized the polarizing events surrounding May 1968 or the widespread influence of the Situationists as indicative of the broader background underscoring postwar architecture, Busbea subtly proposes a more nuanced approach that targets the French architectural avant-garde’s profound faith in technology, a flaw that blinded them to the changes implemented by mass culture and relegated their beliefs to symptoms of the greater historical moment. He cites Jean-Louis Cohen’s assertion that French modernism’s slowness and lack of progress compared to the social sciences developed into a sense of isolation from architectural developments in other countries as well as an interior isolation that defined architecture’s distance from other intellectual enterprises [1]. Critic Reyner Banham proclaimed that the designs of the “urban spatialists” relied too much upon stylistic imperatives enforced through the simplification and flattening of the image. In denouncing a pronounced reliance upon visual formulations; Françoise Choay, however, maintained that the designs of “technotopias” constituted an evocative field of interest for non-specialists. Busbea, in light of these critical perspectives, investigates the cybernetic and theoretical models that intrigued the French designers who privileged the forms of megastructures, attempting to re-connect architecture to the greater social meaning behind infrastructural systems; he carefully teases apart the political distinctions between seemingly similar architectural endeavors such as Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon and Friedman’s Spatial City. Visual artists Nicolas Schöffer and Victor Vasarely, who collaborated with Ragon, formulated a new “plastic language” for the changing conditions of the city, producing ambient environments, murals, and paintings that addressed the phenomenology of perception and the semiotics of the urban landscape that collapsed the distinctions between art object and consumer object. This generation of architects and artists born after Le Corbusier sought to employ technology to eradiate the class struggle that characterized the ambience of France during this time period, balancing the ideals of communist totalitarianism with the economic imperialism of the United States [2]. Utopia — a presumed interpretation that results from the images of Emmerich, Friedman, Parent, and Ragon — is framed rather as an intellectual endeavor by Busbea and not merely as an aesthetic practice residing in the expression of formal structures that embodied leisure, mobility, and spatial dynamics.

While the book’s chapters incorporate factual details behind each architectural group, they alternate rapidly between images of fantasy and research-based models of abstraction that serve as the basis for most of the built urban schemes. What is somewhat problematic is Busbea’s ubiquitous concept of topology, of which he offers several broad definitions — including the given area of a particular region, a specialty branch of mathematics, and the way in which constituent parts are arranged together. Topology is also called upon to define artificial surfaces that cover the city. It is not clear how each of these definitions is tied together throughout the course of the book, which immerses the reader in a great deal of information. This minor point, however, should not detract from an otherwise enriching book with a generous amount of visual material provided in the form of numerous drawings, renderings, sketches, and models. The images themselves may not bear any resemblance to the pragmatic urban solutions sought by French planners; their merit, nonetheless, lies in their existence as archival evidence of these architects’ ideas that reflected the historical and theoretical currents of the decade.

The rise of theory in France during these 10 years is given its fair share of attention. Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, and directors Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Tati, for instance, each critiqued the state ideology behind these inhuman instances of modern planning in France’s postindustrial society. The tensions between the laws posed by Roland Barthes and the experience of perception as emphasized by those such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty loom in the book’s background, but a more direct link between French structuralist theory and the designs of the architectural avant-garde could be better emphasized to assist the reader in perceiving how these urban forms became related to the tents of structuralism, thus merging the social importance of ideas with the physical extension of infrastructure. If the decipherment of the city rested upon the “programmatic expressions of a particular spatial culture” [3], Paris as an “object virtually prepared,” for example, is a particular key image for the reader to hold in mind. If Barthes willingly encouraged visitors atop the Eiffel Tower to sort the urban landscape into its various guises and incarnations, likewise, Busbea skillfully demonstrates that it was the responsibility of the utopian designer to conceive of the plausible postwar cities that could have been for a present audience and for future generations.

[1] Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
[2] Larry Busbea, Topologies, 117.
[3] Ibid, 104.