For almost twenty years, I have been teaching architecture and landscape as one. I keep explaining to the students that architecture no longer belongs to the fine arts, nor may it be considered as a solitary discipline at this point. I have always stressed out the fact that this trade was tightly connected to the notion of global landscape, and accordingly to the consciousness of an enormous responsibility in the act of building and transforming. There is the idea of a political and social involvement here, the idea of a great cause. When architecture is approached from this angle, the question of shared territory comes under scrutiny. The notion has benefited from analytical tools constantly evolving over the past few years, especially when it came to transforming and improving chaotic or even residual places resulting from the territorial disorder and complexity of the twentieth century – a century that often disregarded the issue of landscape. One of the major factors in this evolution is the question of threat, which is everywhere – scientifically, humanly, mentally. If we carefully observe the shared territories we have left in constituted cities, suburbs, and even in the country, everything threatens us: soil contamination, ground water pollution, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, transformations in agriculture, industrial changes, noise, air pollution, fires… To explain a subject like this one to students, I project the scene of the lake from Akira Kurosawa’s film Dersou Ouzala every year at the beginning of the course. The scene perfectly illustrates the optical and natural qualities of a pure landscape. The rise of waters and the raging winds violently threaten the lives of the two characters, who build the shelter that will save them with branches gathered in the nature around them and using the leveling instrument of the surveyor as a frame. This threat is the burning question of the hour, since 2010 marked the centenary of the 1910 flood in Paris; and looking at the place known as Port-de-l’Anglais across from Vitry, one can only be horror-stricken by the level of waters outside periods of floods as recorded by monitoring stations: indeed, the recurrence of the flood would constitute a genuine disaster for Paris and its suburbs (particularly on the eastern side), far worse than the latest floods in the lower Rhone. One of the most apocalyptic places in relation to this topic of the threat is a zone located between Villeneuve-le-Roi and the Seine, which I have called “little Venice.” Geographically close to one of the most sensitive spots of the Parisian suburbs and its marshalling yards, this narrow geographic strip squeezes together railroad tracks, a thoroughfare and the Seine by Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. This distinctive place is semi-abandoned. At night it almost evokes a horror film. The worst is to be found here, from the noise of aircrafts landing and taking off to soil contamination, ground water pollution, a Seveso site, a disused plant, a no-trespassing zone, a scrap yard… The atmosphere strangely calls up the old village in John Boorman’s Deliverance, completely deserted and in a state of neglect before the future lake created by the dam comes to inundate the valley. Granted, a few plants are still in operation and the existing canals accommodate a few barges that look lost. Despite these weak signals, the place is experienced today as a no-trespassing zone, a cursed area. Still, taking a closer look at it, there exists a potential for transformation, use, programming, for taking the threat into account. Excluding the industry, which in the case of a transformation may be subject to a survey and a possible reconversion, we still have canals, river branches, embankments with concrete weathering, lake-like systems surrounded by often splendid wild trees. There is an island as well, the potential of a “park of all constraints” to imagine, and which is in fact the object of ever innovative projects by the students, year after year. This vast, forbidden territory, if it were to become a park, a shared space, could then accommodate a set of programs, breaking the existing territorial deadlock and creating a genuine fluidity with the cities of Ablon, Villeneuve triage, Choisy-le-Roi, and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. The place could also supplement a few programs for the Orly airport, some transitional housing units for homeless individuals, organized in a système de parcs, new clean agricultural industries, a transit space as well as a completely redesigned boating space, perhaps with the creation of a lake echoing the huge lake of the parc des Gondoles located further downstream on the right bank of the Seine, across from Choisy-le-Roi. The mere creation of a huge lake would give the existing social housing project typically referred to as “tough” a dignity and new usages. A waste collection center organized in a système de parcs with production – of bioplastics, for example – could also be considered. The place could embody an actualized version of the ideology of Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, the “city as a système de parcs,” and respond or even connect to all present and future parks along the eastern part of the Seine: Port-à-l’Anglais, parc des Gondoles, parc de la Plage Bleue, parc de Créteil, the expansion of the parc d’Orly towards the Seine. This park-to-park urban planning would foster a new boom in the area east of Paris. Here we are at the heart of the responsibilities and the cause I already mentioned. This is about transforming the quality of life of people living in a rather underprivileged area, not about complacency with the arrogant wealth of the Gulf states or the artificial cities where the nouveaux riches of emerging countries live. We are dealing with concrete questions here, in a social, territorial, and landscaping ideal, that of improving and transforming what may at first look irretrievable. This issue of the reconfiguration of constraints and threats unconsciously shapes attitudes towards architecture and landscape in the minds of students, each time resulting in invention. The notions of excavation and embankment assume a huge importance; the piles, so heroic in Le Corbusier’s villa Savoye, become current again but for different reasons: moving away from contaminated soil, from areas liable to flooding, structures on piles coming back in favor. Everything from paths to roads to build facilities such as housing, public facilities, light industries is called into question from the stage of their conception, if only because of flooding liabilities, pollution, or the noise of aircrafts. The notion of excavation increases the potential acceptance of floods as an integral part in the composition of a project. The notion of embankment encompasses the notion of path or construction off flooding periods. These few remarks on an exemplary place – after all – bring us to the notion of a new aesthetics of architecture and landscape issuing from the threat. Architecture and landscape as conceptual assimilations of the threat may be seen at work in the whole history of the transformation of places, owing to wars and military threats. It goes from the pyramids to the Middle Ages to Vauban, the Maginot Line and bunkers… Today we are at odds with our own fate. More than ever, the intelligence of architecture with respect to the soil, the climate, and countless sources of pollution is key to our survival. This dimension has barely been evoked in the twentieth century, a time when priorities were not set nor ethical choices made…

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Pierre-Louis FALOCI

Paris, 10 february 2010