Introduction

Résumé 0

As Kenneth Frampton emphasized in a special issue of Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (“Team X+20”, no 177, 1975, p. 65) in relation to the members of the group: “While looking for an impossible proof, their creative force broke, and paradoxically what remains of their work is the force of their initial criticism. It’s up to a following generation, unaffected by the delirious mystifying of our recent past, to return to the roots of this criticism and to take up the search for a ‘ different architecture’, in a return to the timelessness of mankind”. It is this critical return, implying a regressive approach of the analysis of the realized and lived “œuvre” and a second reading of its fundaments, that forms the basic issue of the seminar.Putting the ordinary man at the core of its preoccupations, looking for an aesthetics of number and for an articulation of the complexity and articulation of the elements to be taken into account (housing, street, district, city), it was also necessary, as Kenneth Frampton emphasizes, to consider a fault line inside the group. This is obvious between the defenders of the large scale planning and the modernity (of a modernism?), even of the tabula rasa leading to urban restoration, and those who take the existing city into account (Aldo van Eyck and Giancarlo de Carlo).