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Ideas without Winners. The 1980 Counter-competition Les Halles

par Van Acker, Wouter ;Bourouiba, Lyna
Référence 76th Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) (April 12-16 2023: Montréal)
Publication Non publié, 2023-04-12

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

"We don't want to designate a winner, but to provoke thought". With these words Philip Johnson, president of the jury of the 1980 “counter-competition” Les Halles de Paris, summarized the event’s ambition to stand up to the project selected in 1979 by the Paris council, and its refusal to offer room for public debate on the matter. The insurgent zeal, as well as the unusual composition of the jury, which consisted besides architects (D. Agrest, K. Shinohara, etc.) of intellectuals (R. Barthes, H. Lefebvre, etc.), journal editors (T. Maldonado, J. Morris Dixon, etc) and inhabitants' associations, gave the competition an unprecedented character, even though it failed to forestall the consequences of the official decision. The open competition operated in a liminal space between a temporary arena for debate within the discipline, and an inclusive platform of architectural culture which integrated and gave voice to public opinion. Of the 1900 proposals submitted from within 36 countries, 600 were exhibited in a popular department store near the site, which gave the initiative high visibility. A two-day symposium at the Palais des Arts set up second space for debate, this time between the jury, the authors of the projects and an audience. This paper proposes to examine the transdisciplinary and transcultural mechanisms at work in this competition through the prism of the concepts of the “contact zone”. After Mary Louise Pratt, contact zones in architecture may be conceived "not merely as distinct international events but as constructive encounters that produce friction and resistance as much as 'exhilarating moments of wonder, revelation mutual understanding and new wisdom'" (Nuijsink & Avermaete 2020, 107). We aim to study the particularities of its configuration and dynamics both as a space where ideas are being confronted, and where social and culturalcapital is being produced.