Post by Ambrose Gillick
Lecturer, Architecture, MArch Lead and Codirector of Centre for Health & Medical Humanities, University of Kent. Profile and views not representative of my employer’s.* *They made me put this in.
It’s Monday (Yay!/ Boo!) so to lighten that load, for the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I had good chat with architect and historian, Vanessa Grossman, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design about her 2024 book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, published by Yale University Press. Sampling only the most tantalizing soupçon of the book’s ideas, Vanessa and I discuss the relationship between the French Communist Party and postwar modernist architects, and how for them concrete served not just as a symbol of avant-garde taste but also political commitment. Architects like Oscar Niemeyer, Renée Gailhoustet, Paul Chemetov and Patrick Bouchain, and the networks of actors and actants, programs and artefacts that were activated to deliver social housing and cultural and working spaces in communist municipalities across France, as a means of delivering, ultimately, a countersociety of architects that sought to put a new vision of modernism to work towards a better version France’s nascent Fifth Republic. Link below and on other better than average audio places. + Image credit: Jean Biaugeaud, showing the hall of the Raspail housing tower by Renée Gailhoustet, 1968. https://lnkd.in/eBU_sWRB
