| buy book | ANOTHER MODERN, THE POST-WAR ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM OF CANDILIS-JOSIC-WOODS By Tom Avermaete. Rotterdam: NAI. 2005 If Guy Debord and the Situationists claimed the rebellious highground in the day-to-day activist philosophy of post-modern France during the 1960s, the architectural counterpart could be seen in the triumvirate of Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods. Their outspoken critique of the French urban development – ‘And if there are no more cities, we return to savagery’ – took the intelligent stance of ‘another modern’ as Tom Avermaete calls the three architects’ attempt to design and write a new city. With the help of like-minded friends such as Aldo van Eyck or Peter and Alison Smithson of Team 10 they launched poignant attacks against any form of ‘poor Modernism’ which had begun to petrify and was being misinterpreted as the result of a dogmatic CIAM. Avermaete succeeds in capturing this contentious mood in the first full-scale monograph of Candilis-Josic-Woods’ architecture and urbanism since the 1970s. The copious book, which started off as Avermaete’s doctoral thesis, provides an extensive historical, philosophical, socio-political and architectural background for an encompassing assessment of the architects’ complete oeuvre. In post-war France the only constant was change: decolonisation, a growing bureaucracy, increasing mobility as well as migration and new technologies. More than a challenge for three immigrant architects of different nationalities (Greek, Yugoslav, American) working together in Paris. They sharpened their sensibilities during an ad hoc and hands-on study of living conditions in the faltering French colonies of Morocco and Algeria. This investigation on indigenous settlements revealed a high level of domestic intimacy as well as a sense of collectivity. More and more the three architects foresook formal space-time aesthetics for the acknowledgement of real spatialities and temporalities of everyday life. It is therefore not surprising that the Smithsons aptly characterised Candilis-Josic-Woods’ work as a ‘new language of architecture generated by patterns of inhabitation’. The re-framing of the grid, the liberating of open spaces, the return to the street as the structural principle of the urban realm culminates in a complex urban web. This urban tissue consisting of stem, espaces libres and la trame became a trademark of Candilis-Josic-Woods’ architecture. Avermaete delineates the route to architectural maturity starting with Candilis and Woods’ work for Le Corbusier on Unité d’Habitation, their cross examination of CIAM and the architects’ first years of experimentation together with the ATBAT team in North Africa from the early to mid ’50s. In more than one way Candilis and Woods are inextricably connected with the vicissitudes of the Modern Movement and French politics. The foundation of their own office (and the partnership with Alexis Josic) in 1955 coincides with the French colonial surrender. Avermaete continues to show the progression of the architects’ formal evolutions from their early projects like Bagnols-sur-Cèze (1955) to what is probably their greatest masterpiece the Free University of Berlin (1963). Every one of the Candilis-Josic-Woods projects comes across as a permanent reflection of socio-cultural-political sources and influences. It is the strength of the book that it displays architecture not as a linear progression but plays on numerous cross references so that ‘the built environment is not perceived as a static repository of form, but rather as frame, substance and result of spatial practices of dwelling and building’. So the reader gets very close to the heart of what compelled Candilis-Josic-Woods in their architectural designs and writings. CHRISTIAN BRENSING |