What is it of aesthetic size of architecture and urbanism?

By Ali Djerbi Architect DPLG Lecturer at ENAU

 

It is a question that all one each lands today because we are all concerned directly or indirectly, as decision-makers, inventors, directors or users by the act to build and the planning of the space. This question is not new it is recurrent and even dons a universal scale. All countries confronted to the urban development in the context of modernity meet it. It seems to clear the space and the time gleefully to solicit the cultures in mutation. For in to be convinced and especially to measure the relevance of it us refer to the subjects of Françoise Choay in his article title "  The urban mutation 1950-1975", of which we present here after an excerpt appeared in The history of the urban France, Volume V, to the editions of the Doorstep, 1985. It is sufficient to replace the names of places and the dates to recover us on our turn in a similar way.

 

During the period 1950-1975, the urban France undergoes a mutation in the visual organization of his setting structure... However this mutation is synonymous nor of unit nor beauty:  the old architectural shapes dissolve themselves in the confusion of the pseudo styles, the urbanization results in a loss of urbanity and, especially, the quantitative records recorded concerning construction are accompanied by an ugliness production, also unprecedented... The architects had to treat this new program out of all tradition, without contact or relation with the inhabitants. They had for unique interlocutor of the administrations and for unique worry the reduction of the cost price that submitted them to the tutelage of the engineers. Of where, in the majority of the cases and all over the world, the complete absence of the aesthetic effects that the popular or vernacular tradition got spontaneously and the absence as complete of the aesthetic research that was the appendage of the scholarly architecture... Named has build by him (the architect) is not generally in measure to give his aesthetic dimension to a constructive logic that escapes to him...

 

 Among the reasons susceptible to explain this extreme aesthetic destitution of the new setting structure, the most obvious - and probably also the most superficial - resides in the recruitment and the formation of the architects. Mediocre recruitment of a profession without aura and without work in him between two wars, where formed itself the generation called to construct during our period... The reform of May 1968 had to not change anything while making abandon the drawing for the ideology and for a teaching of the liberal arts the more often dispensed by self-educated

 

This ideology of the normalization and the regulation as well as the system of market and payment by the state that puts it of it

In fact, the negative power of the enterprises of the building concerning aesthetics... The architect, in particular, is submitted to him entirely, technically and financially. He has the tendency to become a “know how” of plan and a dresser decorator whose propositions "are undressed" more or less to the will of the conjuncture. More, to reach this liberty under conditions, the architect must also master always the legal constraints of a right of the construction and the urbanism heavier. That requires a bureaucratic infrastructure.

 

 

 

 It is necessary to signal the impact exercised on the aesthetic dimension of the urbanism by a specific technocratic structure, the body of the engineers of the Bridges and Pavements finally... A strict technique of engineers will take the relief of the ideology in the undifferentiated planning of the spaces local, regional, territorial... One sees therefore that the aesthetic dimension of the architecture and the urbanism depends on the meeting, statistically little likely, of practitioners and decision-makers of exception in an institutional setting sterilizing. ."

Françoise CHOAY