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.