juillet 2023
harvard urban review
lume architects x super bueno studio
supersurface supercontrol
Paris owes its actual plan to a tremendous metamorphosis conducted between 1853 and 1870 by Baron Hausmann, Emperor Napoleon III’s Seine Prefect. In less than twenty years, nearly 75% of Parisian buildings has been affected by the major works of Haussmann(1) for whom Paris was to be the privileged tool «of the development of an industrialization and beautification program»(2).
The Haussmannian city is based on three clear principles that gave its motto to its successful transformation: «embellished, enlarged, sanitized».
To achieve their deeds, Haussmann and Napoleon III invented new legal tools that some are still applied these days, the last but not least being a disconcerting facility to expropriate in order to demolish and organize great breakthroughs through the urban fabric, along which the famous Hausmannian buildings were built. If these wide streets are the privileged place to show its wealth off, they were also thought as a fabulous way to prevent what they feared above all: popular revolution.
Too wide to allow the construction of barricades, they also allow the army and the police to reach any point of the city in just a few minutes, thanks to an effective grid of police and military stations.
This «strategic beautification»(3), authoritarian by nature, revolve around architectural and urban events, whether monuments or large voids : the Parisian squares. In Paris, these breakthroughs intersect more than 270 times(4), making it a fertile ground for the development of these public squares. Differently sized or shaped(5), they could have been the object of an appropriation by the inhabitants, but unlike what happened around the English square, this was never really the case.
The Parisian square cannot be the object of a real appropriation since it is not, except for a few exceptions, a unit around which dwellings are organized and where people can develop specific uses within to neighborhood.
It is more of a space you go through, where power is showed off by the installation of sculptures to the glory of the country or by the strict composition of a public garden. Therefore, those squares have become huge roundabout along the centuries with poor public spaces qualities, unlike the rest of the city.
The stone choosen by the architects is dark but luminous. It composed an abstract grid constructed without interruption on the entire surface of the square and makes no difference between the uses inherent to such a space. It gives it a great unity and seems to extend to infinity, a blank canvas to project anything on. A slight threshold hardly separates the lane dedicated to buses and bicycles from the rest of the space. The new Place de la République perfectly echoes the Supersurface theorized by Superstudio : the square exists only when an event is held. By the very admission of its designers, it is more a matter of a scenario of space than a matter of planning. Like a theatre scene, action gives it meaning. Without it, the stage is nothing more than a big void to walk through. It then becomes the ideal place for new political ideas to emerge and reconnect with a certain idea of living together.
Paris, Place de la République before refurbishment, 2006. Jiel Beaumadier
It is this context that the city of Paris has been organizing since 2013 the urban renovation of nearly ten public places. When these renovations often consist of a simple widening of the sidewalks and creating of bike paths, the renovation of Place de la République by TVK architects is more ambitious.
The architects proposed to give back two thirds of this gigantic roundabout to pedestrians, bicycles and buses. The square is free from all street furniture now placed on the periphery and reduced to its strict minimum: roughly cut wooden benches, garbage cans and street lights. Only the fountain of the Republic, symbol of the city and place of mourning since the attacks of 2015, survived the bulldozers.
Water mirror and the Marianne on the new square of the Republic, 2013
Life, Superstudio
Unfortunately, Place de la République has become the place of violent clashes between the population and the police since its renovation : «Nuit Debout»(6), weekly clashes between the police and the “Gilets Jaunes”(7) , demonstrations for the protection of the environment and movements for gender equality, against systemic racism around the world echoing the murder of Georges Floyd in the United States and more recently against pension reform.
While the architects of the new square probably wished to make it the place of a contemporary citizenship would they in fact have developed the ideal tool for the police to organize a massive control of the population in the public space ?
General Assembly of « Nuit Debout » in place de la République, on April 10, 2016. Olivier Ortepa
Recent events seem to go for this thesis, which Haussmann himself could have supported, he the defender of the «nasse» this police technique to trap the demonstrators inside a closed void. Prisoners from space, they are to become prisoners from their minds.
Could the creation of an immense void as a symbol of a contemporary agora be in reality the translation of a naive vision of the public debate ?
Behind this vision lies the thought of an exchange of ideas that could only be held in calm when it is literally transparent, open and visible to all, participants as authorities. On the contrary, one might think that the minority, must benefit from spaces protected from this control exercised by the dominant power. Only then could new ideas arise that would possibly go against the authority in place, otherwise some form of censorship is inevitable.
Barricades, collage Super Bueno Studio, 2020
The architecture of the crypt would then be the ideal form for a divergent thought to develop in its heart instead of these giant open voids. Since the collective demonstration and the emergence of a dissenting power is difficult within Place de la République, it often serves as an arrival point for the processions or is used to welcome a succession of speeches that illustrate a form of failure in expressing its revendications since the dissidents themselves become passive of their own ideas. This myth that any struggle can only be resolved through dialogue is a terrible affront led by a ruling class that does not realize that some situations require one to lose one’s calm and that violence may also lie in the power it exerts on its contemporaries. Similarly, pure action is not enough to legitimize a cause.
The Supersurface of Place de la République allowed the inauguration of more or less perennial structures, laid on the ground. For a season, «Nuit Debout» became the concretization of the most advanced Superstudio’s theories. It was too much for the police, who, night after night, relentlessly laid down these structures. This is probably one of the reasons why the «Nuit Debout» of 2016 was cut short : shared between discourse and experimentation, these forms of encounters never really succeeded in reconciling action and theory.
Perhaps this is the reason why the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter became a symbolic place of struggle, a successful mix of actions and exchange of ideas and perhaps this is also the same reason why the police have not stopped attracting the “Gilets Jaunes” to the Place de l'Etoile, so big that it is easy to control movements, a place of power on which the only speeches that will ever be made will remain those speeched by the State.
The endless succession of speeches becomes unproductive because it puts all causes on the same level of importance. Different diseases, one treatment : public speaking, up to the caricature when on Saturday, fifteen people gather around a speaker whose sound that comes out of the sizzling speakers is hard to hear. No one listens, no one understands what this little troop has come to defend. In the background, skateboards rolling on the dark stone that wants us to no longer take up fights.
(1) Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano & Franck Boutté, Paris Haussmann : modèle de ville, Park books, Paris, 2017 – page 11
(2) Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano & Franck Boutté, Paris Haussmann : modèle de ville, Park books, Paris, 2017 – page 05
(3) Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXème siècle : Le livre des passages (1924-1939), édition du verf, Paris, 1997
(4) Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano & Franck Boutté, Paris Haussmann : modèle de ville, Park books, Paris, 2017 – page 21
(5) Benoit Jallon, Umberto Napolitano & Franck Boutté, Paris Haussmann : modèle de ville, Park books, Paris, 2017 – page 19
(6) Citizen reflection organized in reaction to the policy led by the government of the President of the Republic François Hollande and dislodged by the police after several weeks.
(7) Popular uprising born from the rise of fuel prices and extended to the criticism of the entire political action of President Emmanuel Macron since 2018