Jean Renaudie in Ivry-sur-Seine (1970-1975): Architectural complexity in the materialization of social cohesion

Abstract

The social effects of the Athens Charter’s materialization (1933) during the post-war period were questioned by the next generation of architects, proposing concepts such as association, mobility, identity or growth, distancing from the recurring functional sectorization. In France, this criticism generated alternative experiments to the linear block and the tower, with which cities had been rebuilt during the Thirty Glorious years. This article jointly analyzes three complexes built by Jean Renaudie for the urban renewal of Ivry-sur-Seine’s Parisian neighborhood –Danielle Casanova (1970-1972), Jeanne Hachette (1970-1975) and Jean-Baptiste-Clément (1973-1975)—. The analysis of the programmatic hybridization carried out through the combination of a great typological diversity of dwellings together with cultural, educational and commercial facilities will be identified with an architectural thought punctuated by multidisciplinary influences, derived from the cultural landscape of May ’68. The political and philosophical concept of social cohesion, complemented by the desire to translate the biological order of nature architecturally, will allow us to understand its theoretical challenge. The construction of ideas in previous utopian proposals, reworked in subsequent projects, will place that architecture at the turning point of a trajectory that legitimized complexity against any type of homogeneity