Purple Magazine
— F/W 2012 issue 18
Ivry-sur-Seine
photography by OLIVIER AMSELLEM
text by DAVID LIAUDET
Just outside of Paris is IVRY-SUR-SEINE, one of the last Communist cities in France. This cluster of buildings was constructed in the 1970s by the French urbanist and architect Jean Renaudie and would remain an awe-inspiring project. The term Brutalist, which often attaches to Renaudie’s work, doesn’t do justice to the oasis of houses that resulted. Rem Koolhaas sent his students there to get inspired — not just about housing but also about humanism — by the geometrical angles and garden terraces brimming with greenery.
Between 1970 and 1975 Jean Renaudie (1925-81) created a low-income housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris. Renaudie built the residences at a time when high-rise buildings were going up all over France. His design emerged from his humanistic examination of the needs of residents, many of them from the Ivory Coast; the architectural constraints; and his talent as an architect. Renaudie had to come up with a plan for subsidized housing within the strictures of a limited amount of space and funding. He based his rough concrete constructions on triangles, using contemporary buttresses, and an elegant management of internal circulation areas, which turned his massive urban artifice into an garden environment with different-sized apartments and terraces. Residents could then install real gardens on their premises. The result was a mix of white walls and foliage, an affordable Babylon on the outskirts of Paris. Even today his work remains a model for such housing. Everything grows in Ivry-sur-Seine. Like the retirement home Renaudie constructed in Givors, France, the entire Ivry district can be browsed like a well-planned garden. Such a project was the dream of Le Corbusier decades before. Renaudie’s sheltered city allows residents to experience a garden landscape in the middle of an urban environment. The vegetation isn’t simply organic camouflage — a public concession to provide nature to low-income residents — but an affirmation of Renaudie’s approach to life and architecture.
