Machine à habiter n°1

2023, white cement, L30.5 x D27.5 x H46 cm 

 

Machine à habiter n°2 - Absalon's lost work

2024, digital photo

 

Here we find a mixture of personal history and critical positioning. My childhood in the suburbs of Paris confronts the ideals of the architect Le Corbusier and meets the artist Meir Eshel, known as Absalon, in an attempt to reflect on the urban context in which I grew up and, more generally, on the place of the human being in these areas that are brutally and deliberately sterile, although very dynamic and highly contradictory to the very idea of being human.

 

Where Absalon saw his Cellules as 'mental spaces', determining a form of life based on resistance, habit, mechanism and constraint, as forms not of alienation but of emancipation, this fragile object with its minimalist aesthetic and uncertain status, somewhere between model and proposal, sketch and shoddy work, is intended as a mental projection, the externalisation of a reliquary ghost, an inhuman monolith for downgraded humans where the emancipation of the individual is precisely the objective not to be achieved. But after all, what else can we expect from a ''machine for inhabiting''?

 

I'd now like to hand over to Thibaud Zuppinger:

"Architectural and urban planning projects are symbolic and easily become the illustration of an ideology, embodying the omnipotence of the powers that be. [...] We cannot deny the latent element of violence that exists in major urban projects. "The architect of the Cité radieuse used violence to bend human beings to the inflexible dimensions of his monumental edifice" [L. Munford, The Marseille Foly, quoted by F. Choay, p. 40]. [...] 

It is by uprooting individuals that we make them malleable, for better or for worse. [...] The habitation is understood here as a simple technical auxiliary to compensate for our physical weaknesses in the face of the world and the rigours of the climate. The link between the home and the machine is explicitly aimed at human conditioning. A renewed form of bio-politics. Indeed, "the house is a machine for inhabiting", because it plays a role in "conditioning the mind, a role as decisive and much more extensive than that imposed in ages past by the hegemonies of war" [Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, Paris, Crès, 1925, p. 73]. [...] Material order must serve to establish a mental climate in space. For Le Corbusier, one of the essential conditions of a harmonious city is to sweep away the affectivity of the home in order to accompany the migrations of work: "the concept of 'my roof' disappears" [Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, op. cit. ,p. 219]. [...] Taking the flexibility imposed by the labour market as the norm implies, it is true, doing without the notion of home. Except, however, that the home is not only the place where the ego takes refuge to find rest, it is the central point from which the familiarity that pacifies the surrounding world springs. In Le Corbusier's projects, the climate is neither truly urban (in the sense that Jane Jacobs, for example, might understand it) nor collective. He acknowledges atomisation and speaks more often of units and sets of units. This is a conception in which the whole prevails over the parts. [...]

 

"This is how the herd is led" because "the world needs harmony and to be guided by harmonisers" [Le Corbusier, Manière de penser l'urbanisme, p. 92 and Appendix I]. The town planner as human breeder".

 

And yet, in Grigny, as elsewhere in the suburbs, people are fighting against adversity.