The

Les midis des livres: A talk on architectural criticism

Physical location
Library - ENSAPLV - 144 avenue de Flandre, 75019 Paris

Still from Jacques Tati’s film Playtime (1967) – © Brankica Radic

The “Les midi des livres” cycle continues.
Hélène Jannière, author of ” Architectural criticism, a disputed space. Critics, architects and public opinion. France 1953-1977 “(Rennes, Presses de l’université de Rennes, 2025), Denis Bilodeau and Louis Martin, authors of ” Criticism at work. Fragments of an architectural discourse “(Paris, Éditions de la Villette, 2025), are the guests of the next talk.

They will be talking to Margaux Darrieus, Senior Lecturer at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, and Pierre Chabard, Senior Lecturer at ENSA Paris-la Villette.

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?
  

Authors’ and moderators’ biographies

  • Architect and architectural historian Hélène Jannière taught in French architecture schools from 1994 to 2012, notably at ENSA Paris-la Villette. She is now a professor at Rennes 2 University, where she heads the History and Criticism of the Arts research team.
  • Trained as an architect, Denis Bilodeau holds a doctorate in architecture from the Technical University of Delft, and is a full professor at the School of Architecture of the Faculté de l’aménagement at the Université de Montréal, where he teaches the project, history and theory of modern architecture.
  • Louis Martin graduated in architecture from the Université de Montréal. After a few years in practice, he continued his studies in architectural history, theory and criticism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), before completing a PhD at Princeton University in 2002.
  • Pierre Chabard is an architect, historian and architectural critic. A lecturer at ENSA Paris-la Villette, he is editorial director of Éditions de la Villette.
  • Margaux Darrieus trained as an architect and holds a doctorate in architecture. She is a lecturer in the theory and practice of architectural and urban design at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, and a member of the ACS research laboratory. She is also a journalist and architecture critic.

Event