| dc.description.abstract | Reviewed by Jennifer Ferng, Department
of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. E-mail: <jferng@mit.edu>.
Bobigny, La Courneuve and Sarcelles,
as well as other planning projects
such as Maine-Montparnasse and La
Défense, constitute some of the grand
ensembles constructed in Paris during
the 1950s and 1960s that scholars have
examined in order to understand the
effects of national identity and political
regionalism on the French urban landscape.
Regulated by the administrative
policies of Charles de Gaulle’s return
to power in 1958, these housing prototypes
of the Fifth Republic transformed
the Parisian periphery into a series of
“dormitory cities” composed of habitations
à loyer modéré (HLMS), plunging
what was to be ordered reconstruction
into contentious social and economic
problems. Topologies is another notable
volume that contributes to the widening
body of literature on postwar architectural
history that reinterprets the
technological thinking of French utopian
architects, along with those such
as Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, the
Metabolists, Cedric Price and Team 10,
who collectively foresaw the dawning of a new age, tempered not by revolution
but by the scientific techniques gained
from economics and the social sciences.
The book provides detailed biographical
information on the work of David
Georges Emmerich, Yona Friedman,
Claude Parent and Michel Ragon while
contextualizing their building schemes
of 3D space frames and networked
agglomerations against the ideas of
well-known theorists Jean Baudrillard,
Henri Lefebvre, Johannes Huzinga and
Paul Virilio, whose thoughts on consumer
society, space, play and the body,
respectively, inspired these architects’
visions of the evolving city. | en_US |
