Philippe Boudon

Interestingly, the study on which this book is based was compiled roughly forty years after Pessac’s completion and, after an additional forty years, I finally got around to reading it. Four decades is also the oft-mentioned life expectancy for many buildings constructed in the US – a few last longer and obviously many get their pink slip more quickly (think, the “eight year Wal-Mart truss”). I’m inclined, therefore, to posit that it’s laughable to consider this octogenarian community to be a failed architectural experiment/proclamation regardless of the various adaptations that mar the antiseptic cohesion of the original structures. I once designed a reasonably good public building that, despite ownership by that city’s Parks Department and despite the structure’s role in honoring an figure of international importance, was allowed to be butchered by some bank’s ATM and Anheuser-Busch within three years!

But I digress…

This is composed of relatively readable text with some nice diagrams and, I think, a rigorous methodology of enumeration, William Whyte-like adjacency factoring, and resident response categories. At some point (very early on) my efforts to constantly correlate the diagrams and unit/resident location maps with the interview fragments fell far to the wayside. This may reflect more on my impatience than the organization of the book components, but I suspect others might agree that this isn’t very smooth. At the very least, after inevitably setting this aside for ten days here and there, I was pleased that the author included the occasional “and if you’ll recall, so-and-so said this…” that did wonders for helping tie all of this together.

Barring the occassionally impenetrable syntax of the more rustic residents (as well as some so-called “intellectuals” - perhaps there was a lost-in-translation issue?) there’s much within the various parts that’s of interest. I found the group discussion between a few architects, a “decorator,” and an obviously cantankerous structural engineer engaging if only because of the latter’s quip about how a military defense construction technique – the 30 to 50 cm thick concrete roofs – was repositioned by “idiots” as a progressive architectural system. Selected interview exerpts of the residents – some original, others more recent arrivals – paints a picture that could not possibly yield any clear “answer” about how the architecture or planning invites or precludes different types of transformations. True, the floor plans offer more possibilities than perhaps more conventional counterparts and the bare facades seem to call for some pimping up to most non-orthodox-modernist occupants, but predictably there’s no clear formula to all of this.

The primary question seems to be whether the settlement’s ultimate status as an armature sporting different coats of schlock override any objections that Le Corbusier would have had. Would the Master come to some sort of socio-ethical reconciliation with the results? Without fear of being branded a heretic, I would say that a certain dog-ugliness pervades both the purist and transmogrified versions. I suppose my question is whether this is really any different than say, the Theater of Marcellus or, for that matter, the Dogon cliff dwellings. Perhaps more relevantly, this seems an interesting counterpart to the Rural Studio book Proceed and Be Bold, a ten year anniversary (mostly) photo essay showing some of the early homes and their occupants’ transformations. As distasteful as some of these Alabama alterations may seem to us elitist architects, they don’t necessarily destroy the integrity of the original constructs which typically pursued something of a controlled Ad Hoc-ness. Did/do the tacked-on castellations, ribbon window extirpations, and cheap veneers of Pessac deserve more scrutiny than resident adjustments to the Hale County work or the crass signage and green awnings tacked on to any given quasi-palazzo in New York City? In my opinion it doesn’t. However this is a great document (excepting the crappy photos – oddly cropped like those of my grandmother beheading the whole family in holiday pics. Someone should send Tim Hursley over there.). It seems as though it might have spawned similar studies of unprotected buildings and complexes. I suppose the inevitable failure in securing any particular conclusion deters such an ambitious study. The promise of ending up with more questions that one starts with is probably undesirable to most funding organizations.… (meer)