Bookstore release: "La Critique à l'œuvre", Éditions de la Villette
© Éditions de la Villette
A lively, scholarly analysis of key episodes in the recent history of architectural criticism. With contributions by Georges Adamczyk, Paolo Amaldi, Jean-Pierre Chupin, Carmella Cucuzzella, Bechara Helal, Rainier Hoddé, Hélène Jannière, Jonathan Lachance, Réjean Legault, David Theodore and Estelle Thibault.
La Critique à l’œuvre
Fragments d’un discours architectural
Denis Bilodeau and Louis Martin (dir.)
Release date: May 2025
The current environmental crisis confronts architects with the need to redefine their ethical positions, giving a renewed role to architectural criticism. But this link between crisis and criticism, beyond a common etymology, remains equivocal. Does criticism react to crises, or does it provoke them? Do the internal crises that regularly plague criticism coincide with those affecting architecture, its institutions and, more broadly, society? Is the purpose of criticism to act within the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, or, on the contrary, to mediate the worlds it is supposed to transform? Can architecture itself arm itself with critical potential? These recurring questions, which have accompanied the development of modern and postmodern architecture, now have a long history that the present collection helps to illuminate. Stemming from a number of symposia, study days and research projects, the investigations it brings together detail certain episodes or key players on both sides of the Atlantic, from Bruno Zevi to Reyner Banham, via Alexander Tzonis and Kenneth Frampton.
News
Christian Barani meets L1 students to discuss the film "Penser l'incertitude" ("Thinking about uncertainty")
As part of the inaugural week, an afternoon was dedicated to discovering different cultural practices (shows, films, scenography workshops, etc.).
Around sixty first-year students attended the screening of the documentary “Penser l’incertitude”, which portrays a new generation of architects and landscape architects, winners of the AJAP 2023 awards. Travelling through landscapes, traversing worksites and visiting buildings, these young professionals bear witness to their work, the meaning of a delicate commitment and an attention to caring for territories and the people who live in them.
The screening was followed by a discussion with filmmaker Christian Barani and Hervé Bougon, co-founder and general manager of the Close-Up festival, whose 5th edition will be held from November 17 to 25, 2025.
"Ça dépend" by Jeremy Till, Éditions de la Villette
Finally available in French, this classic of contemporary architectural theory opens a definitive breach in architects’ belief in the autonomy of their discipline.
Bookstore release: "La Critique à l'œuvre", Éditions de la Villette
A lively, scholarly analysis of key episodes in the recent history of architectural criticism. With contributions by Georges Adamczyk, Paolo Amaldi, Jean-Pierre Chupin, Carmella Cucuzzella, Bechara Helal, Rainier Hoddé, Hélène Jannière, Jonathan Lachance, Réjean Legault, David Theodore and Estelle Thibault.