20
21
62
D
Ministry of Ecology, Paris, 2014
86
F
Veolia Campus, Lomme, 2012
106
H
Immeuble de bureaux Résonance, Bagneux, 2016
J
137
M
179
210
O
215
42 kilometres Aurélien Bellanger
I grew up 42 kilometres from Paris; this is my sole privilege. For a long time I observed Paris from my window in the evening, as if it were a setting sun. For a long time I dreamed of the city I was not sure of belonging to. For me when I was eight or ten a city was more a theoretical object than a place for living in. There was a naive architect dwelling inside me and for a long time I was jealous of real architects. This was the métier I most admired, to the point where it is one of the few I never dared aspire to. Surgeon, president of France, novelist: in that order. Architect: never. The sociological explanation probably lies in those 42 kilometres or, more prosaically still, in being hopeless at maths, which must have been seen as a bar to the profession. Another, more mystical explanation has to do with my uncertainty about a calling which, as a child and a teenager, I had always regarded as threatened with extinction – with the triumph of a formless, annular, failed city seemingly built almost without a single architect. But at the same time, despite this vacuity and these failings, there existed a shredded, endlessly trashed spatial texture that still, as a whole, offered the weird, incomplete feeling of a possible aesthetic success. The landscape I grew up in possesses its own incomparably beautiful virtues – all, maybe, accidental. A further hypothesis about why I didn’t want to be an architect might have to do, secretly, with pride rather than modesty: pride in knowing that there existed somewhere, where no one had seen it and no one had built it, a city hidden away in my childhood impressions – the cathedral subsumed into Proust’s madeleine. There was a kind of novelistic miracle here; I knew that I would have to recount it one day and that there would be something seminal about my narrative. The artistic revolt of an inhabitant of the urban outskirts. That’s what my main creation would be: not a building, but an entire city. The proof that there was a city, a real city, which everyone had either refused to see or had only seen so as to proclaim its fundamental nullity. I had sensed around me the abnormal, abnormally potent existence of a city on the margin of cities. Like space turned inside out. We’ve seen architects impatient, annoyed, desperate. Architecture is an absurd task: architects are asked to solve problems while always suspected of being responsible for them. People travel thousands of kilometres to contemplate any old masterpiece of naive architecture and go into ecstasy about its terrific climatic virtues. People dream of being reincarnated as a cat on an island in the Cyclades while not giving a damn about the Athens Charter. To restate this feeling more clearly, the enigma – encountered, I think, by anyone who has spent too much time tramping urban peripheries – is as follows: cities have always succeeded, whereas architecture can fail. Even so, we know – you see nothing else but this kilometre after kilometre – that architects are serious and the city isn’t. Failed architecture, that’s what cities are made of. You only have to open your eyes and stroll around a little. I’ve never seen a failed city. Cities will always be better at architecture than architects are. That, in my opinion, is the fundamental enigma. And to be an architect is not so much to try to solve it as, maybe, to really understand it. Rem Koolhaas has come up with a smart solution to this paradox: “If there’s a method to follow in this line of work, it’s systematic idealisation; an automatic overestimation of what’s already there.” Everything – even the worst buildings, even the most modern of all – must be treated with the same
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