Druot, Lacaton & Vassal, “Plus” Principle and the Preservation of the Domestic Condition, OBL/QUE
Revised text (2018):
This is an analysis of the potentialities of the PLUS principle, by the French architects’ Fréderic Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. It will be given a symptomatic reading of the proposed architectural expedient, in order to go beyond the sole object and expose a scenario whose problematic result contingent upon and crucial to conservation not only of substantial fragments of the urban fabric but also of an existing concept of domesticity.
“Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform and re-use!” (1)
Druot, Lacaton & Vassal claim to continue building the past in order to reanimate existing conditions. They deconstruct the historical bias against French Modernist housing, the so-called grands ensembles, by recognizing their latent potentialities.(2) Their position hides a controversial relationship with the inheritance of the masters’ legacy, in a parallel acceptance but rejection and re-proposition of their same architectural language. Preservation, in their case, is the act of novelty because it contrasts the commonly accepted solution for the stigmatized aforementioned housing complexes. Not to demolish, in the case of housing (i.e. real estate interests) represents an act of resistance to the conforming forces of the market. Moreover, for the architects, transforming is “an act of jurisprudence,” an act of “political generosity” that takes into account the inhabitants, hence a large variety of cases in contrast with the standard models and series that were and still are implicit in these architectures.
ENJOYMENT
The triad’s symptomatic approach to architecture can be thus read through Lacan's lenses. In fact, modern masters represent for the architects their primary linguistic source of reference and examples of not only architectural order, but also meaning.3 It is thus possible to say that they represent the architects’ symbolic authority that has obviously been lost in time and reappears in a distorted version in the form of grands ensembles. The massive presence of the gigantic estates within the urban realm and the subsequent acts of refurbishment embody a failure that weighed over an entire generation of architects. Thus, the only cure possible represents the architect’s own PLUS “anti-virus,” i.e. a re-coding of the same modernist language applied over the decaying (yet still valuable) body of the inherited architectural forms. It can be thus said that the architects enjoyed their own symptom by repeating the same framework throughout their entire architectural production.
It can be, therefore, correct to say that what the architects are proposing - in Benjaminian terms – is a new allegorical framework to be applied to the existing structures. Meaning that the architects reworked a “ruined” language and put it together in a new way so that it could produce new meaning. However, if the PLUS principle would be applied widespread all over modernist housing ensembles – as proposed by the architects - a scary result would clearly show up: identical glass facades would replace the monotony that characterizes these estates. Monotony would replace monotony: the solution would just look like the problem.
THRESHOLD
The new architectural addition of the PLUS principle generates a space of threshold. The winter gardens and balconies are simultaneously an extension of the interiors but extraneous entities anchored to a past substance, yet structurally independent. The new potentially ubiquitous system proposed presents itself as a new layer of meaning, an in- between condition that generates surfaces of tension.
“The winter garden is a sensitive space,” it allows for changes in the interiors as a stage set and allows a vision of “two states of existence.” (4)
This liminality hints to surfaces of tension that divide and connect different stages of development.
The new threshold has the quality to illuminate about existing conditions. It manifests the inability to change in the realm of interiors through the expedient of a transitory condition, an intermediate zone.5 Photography here represents an instant of synthesis of a crystallization of domesticity in the form of everyday objects and pieces of furniture seen as a fragment of the temporal dimension of dwelling interiors. This constellation of objects is inherent of a logic of accumulation that can be traced back to its capitalistic roots but moves at a totally different pace. The piling of minutiae, small mismatched, eclectic fragments manifests in the form of objects carriers of meaning and signs of affection.
“Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition. I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” (6)
The dialectic image proposed allows a vibration between two different time dimensions. Exactly as described by Beckett, the image analyzed relates to this state of tension that develops within the threshold, i.e. the overlap between “mind” and “world” that is inherent in the exterior-interior dialectic.
Fig.2: Photo 65 / Photo Author: Philippe Ruault
THE SOFA
The contemporary intervention of French architects Druot, Lacaton & Vassal creates new “extra space” that condenses a new intermediate time. The image, as well as the new architecture alongside the old sofa and everyday objects such as shopping cart, they all vibrate.7 They are the debris of time leading up to an aesthetization of the fragment whose assemblage leads to a true condensation of reality. The image stops “what-has-been” and the rituals of daily life, creating a sort of “temporal chasm” that occurs in the moment in which the old façade is removed and the “secret” of families is shown in the sunlight. Once given a neutral grid, it is populated by objects that suddenly are deterritorialized. Adding space, the territory changes its nature and the objects’ isolation within the grid freezes their meaning. The constellation of the past is opposed the framework of the present,
the latter serves as a basis for the reading of the object’s system.(8) What is fundamentally at stake is that the grid of freed possibilities is occupied by banality and kitsch. Thus, the superimposition of the dialectical image takes the existing reality to its limit and in some ways helps to denounce its absurdity by showcasing the fragmentary condition of the past as essentially an accumulation of debris. Everyday habits are exhibited and that makes evident their triviality and results in something evidently disturbing.
These fragments are the leftovers of the real everyday life, they are all remainders of culture that have been re-justaposed and put out of their common context, they’ve been grounded in a new condition, re-framed in a new allegorical space. The allegorists don’t work to overcome fragmentation, rather, they remain faithful to the “ruins” (seen as an idea of a broken wholeness, which in this case can be the domestic sphere), the rubble out of which meaning can be constructed but also the “material remnants” still “active in shaping the individual’s history.”(9) It is therefore possible to speculate that they can represent the leftovers of an ideal domestic dimension that tried to find its space in the pigeonholed structure of grands ensembles. Moreover, if we think of these fragmented incursions of the real from a psychoanalytical point of view, it is also possible to compare them with a constellation of objects petit a that, in Lacanian terms, function as “disruptors of the signifier” (meaning the light architectural structure that claims to follow the language of the fathers) “exploding its coherence, even annulling its meaning.” This phenomena is the exemplification of the symptom’s enjoyment, in which the objects a are placed in the position of masters signifier. Indeed, the role attributed to everyday objects is paramount and it has been multiple times stressed by the architects themselves, claiming that life (the leftovers of the real) has always been the main driving force of their projects.
NOTES:
1. F. Druot, A. Lacaton & J. P. Vassal, PLUS - Les Grands Ensembles de Logements - Territoire d’exception, Barcelona: GG, 2007.
2. F. Druot, A. Lacaton & J. P. Vassal, PLUS - Les Grands Ensembles de Logements - Territoire d’exception, Barcelona: GG, 2007, p. 23.3. “[T]hey always continue building the past (...) As they reject the modernist policy of decimating history but
3. “[T]hey always continue building the past (...) As they reject the modernist policy of decimating history but formally articulate their rejection in a clearly modernist architectural language.” F. Druot, A. Lacaton & J. P. Vassal, PLUS - Les Grands Ensembles de Logements - Territoire d’exception, Barcelona: GG, 2007, p. 23. 4. “They prefer to design from inside to outside, by placing the program in such a way that it extends into space until, from within, it touches against the boundaries of the permitted built volume.” The Plus principle, French architects Druot, Lacaton & Vassal formulate a new strategy for the regeneration of modernist high occupancy housing in France, Ilka & Andreas Ruby, in Druot, Lacaton & Vassal, Tour Bois le Pretre, Berlin: Ruby Press, 2013. 5. “Staying between two glasses is better if you have some life in between.”A. Lacaton & PJ. P. Vassal, GSD lecture “Freedom of use”, March 24, 2015.
6. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 1958 in G. Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013, p. 1.
7. “[E]verything (that has) to do with people’s intimacy has to be shown with generosity.” F. Druot, A. Lacaton & J. P. Vassal, PLUS - Les Grands Ensembles de Logements - Territoire d’exception, Barcelona: GG, 2007, p. 51.
8. “How can human fullness be rebuilt in clarity? How can the order of an architectonic chrystal be penetrated with the true tree of life, with the human ornament?” E. Bloch, Building in empty spaces in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 1977, p. 197.
9. “Ultimately the symptom, far from being all malady and destructive incursion, prevents totalization within subjectivity with of without art, by constantly reintroducing fragmentation, anti-meaning, and materiality.” E. Stewart, Catastrophe and Survival, W. Benjamin and Psychoanalysis, NY: Continuum, 2010, p. 53.
