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 from 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.
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Reprint: "Persian Gardens" by Gaëtane Lamarche-Vadel, Éditions de la Villette
Far from orientalist fantasies, identity essentialisations or tourist stereotypes, this book, which was awarded the Prix de l’Essai Émile Gallé in 2025, restores Persian gardens to their present-day reality, their multiple uses, their relationship with the elements and traces the complexity of their cultural roots.
Bookstore release: "Mai 68. Parole à l'architecture", Éditions de la Villette
The book brings together some thirty interviews with key figures from this historic turning point, including Jean-Louis Cohen, François Very, Bernard Huet, Roland Castro, Henri Ciriani, Monique Eleb and Jacques Lucan… Curated by Caroline Maniaque, Éléonore Marantz and Jean-Louis Violeau, who also curated the exhibition “Mai 68. L’Architecture aussi!” exhibition at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in summer 2018, the book restores the kaleidoscopic words of this “generation” and puts them into historical perspective.
Toyō Itō's inner landscapes
While in March, ENSAPLV celebrated several decades of educational, scientific and human relations for a week in the presence of a delegation from its Japanese partner universities, the month of April is marked by the publication of this collective work by Maki Onishi, Toyō Itō, Benoît Jacquet and Yann Nussaume in the “Paysage et Architecture” collection from éditions Arléa.
Making visible. Values of ordinary things
Just published in Éditions Boa’s DÉCRIRE collection, this collective work is edited byAlessia de Biase, architect-urban planner, HDR professor in SHS at ENSA Paris-la Villette and director of the LAA-LAVUE research unit, and Emilie Pillon, architect, doctoral student in anthropology at LAA-LAVUE.
As with the other volumes in the collection, one or other artist is involved in a dialogue with the theme of the book: photographer and video artist Valérie Jouve contributed to this work, alongside Catherine Deschamps & Pascale Absi, Philippe Bonnin, Chloé Gaspari, Federica Gatta, Flavia Pertuso & Étienne Kretzschmar, Nadja Monnet & the Momkin association, Mina Saidi Shahrouz, Maud Santini, Anne-Claire Vallet and Valeria Volpe.
"What does space do to us? The anthropologist and the space turn", edited by Ferdinando Fava
This collective work, prepared by Ferdinando Fava (1960-2025), a member of the LAA UMR LAVUE 7218 research unit at ENSA Paris-la Villette, has just been published posthumously in the DÉCRIRE collection by Éditions Boa.
"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.