DEAR READER

Letter from Henri Ciriani in Paris

Lettre de Ciriani aux lecteurs du journal de l'Institut Royal d'architectes britanniques (R.I.B.A.)
de mai 1997, volume 104, numéro 5

Ci-dessous le texte écrit par Ciriani qui fut légèrement modifié par endroits par l'éditeur, John Welsh, sans doute pour une meilleuure compréhension/réception des architectes anglais...

WORLD SERVICE Letter from Henri Ciriani in Paris

The change of presidential regime from Mitterand to Chirac has not been a problem for French architects. Despite financial cutbacks, the French are and always will be builders - clients start building even if they have not quite got the funds together. No, the real problem for French architects is the competition system.

There is a lot of envy among foreign architects of our competition system because all entrants get paid. But if we were real businessmen, we would try our best to lose certain competitions. We could also use the competition system as a way of developing innovative spatial solutions to contemporary demands.

Unfortunately we are born to build, leaving us susceptible to the real problems of competitions.

I am an architect of the 1950s, born to an era where the architect was an intellectual and cultural person working for the betterment of society. The architect was part of the brief, responding to the programme by creating prototoypical buildings. Now, many things have changed. Not only on account of ever-present competitions but also because of the new tools for rendering at our disposal. Drawings have to be flashy for jurors to be seduced immediately or your project is discarded from the start. We must admit that without our taking notice, we are more and more confronted, as assessors or as participants, to the so-called new plans which are almost impossible to understand by a layman —due to the complex rendering of elevations and computer-originated images of superimposed transparencies— but which are just a very simple box once you’ve « peeled » the surface.

Models have acquired a new importance so the roof has become the main façade. Transparent roofs and flat or formally-complex (easily drawn by a computer) plans were to be a trademark of the so-called « new French architecture » of the 1990s. In this country, the phantom of Beaux Arts still haunts the minds of architects. Take any one of the large competitions, where sophisticated technical installations or the complexity of the brief were brushed aside by the architect and the clients alike. It’s the image of the building that counts, not what it means or does. You hear incredible things like, « if a building fits the brief it lacks creativity », the magic word of the day, where it is considered « far out » to have a building which permits continual changes. Clients are fascinated by the irresponsibility of choice. Knowing what to do is frequently regarded as authoritarian and therefore unwanted. As if the future only meant change. This attitude has led to projects being reduced to their simplest essential images thus arousing a childish attitude to design.

So if you do respond to the brief, dealing with the real problems of fire or escape, you will never win a competition. If you do make the building fit the brief, then clients get worried they will have to build what has been drawn. With the exception of hospitals, where programmes have to fit the brief, what clients really want to do is to make constant changes to the brief. These comments apply to the large competitions for the main public buildings of recent years not to small-town competitions where the issue isn’t architecture at all.

More and more architects have become obsessed with following fashion. I believe buildings must be a logical product of the brief. It makes a building belong to its times and be eternal. To make architecture by transforming the brief into its constituent spaces is the hardest thing to achieve. But today we see architects sticking a roof like an aeroplane wing on the top of schools, for example. Classrooms should look like classrooms and work as classrooms.

Increasing lack of experience explains such superficiality. Architects no longer go to visit buildings. They prefer to see them in magazines, where they are more and more deviated from pure knowledge. In most magazines today images take precedence over content as they are under the pressure of their readers who want to understand immediately. Big colour photographs are preferred to plans and sections and little is said of programme or the difficulties encountered during the design process, etc.

These so-called new-buildings intend to be a 2-D experience, the spatial experience of architecture being overlooked, when not belittled. The less knowledge architects have, the more they can imitate some new philosophy. Projects become more and more mere surfaces which idealize situations where understanding and emotion are banned. They would have us live in a comic-book-architecture world where there is no place for the body or the spirit.

Envoyé par fax le 10 avril 1997