Françoise Fromonot – författare

Gumshoe is new series of architectural books, introducing a new approach to the writing of architectural history. It returns the focus of architectural discourse back onto buildings, in a style and form that is original and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. It emulates the detective novel – a form of writing beloved by many, but also one that has enjoyed a parallel academic life in disciplines and by writers as diverse as psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), film (Sigfried Kracauer), and art history (Carlo Ginzburg) — but, significantly, not yet by architecture. Each volume will investigate a singular building as if it were a mystery waiting to be solved.Written by distinguished French architectural critic and historian Françoise Fromonot, the first case — The House of Doctor Koolhaas — is about the Villa dall’Ava, a private residence in Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris. Fromonot brilliantly unpicks, explains and interprets the very first building completed by Rem Koolhaas, who is universally regarded as the world’s most celebrated architect, and his Rotterdam-based firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

A thorough and interdisciplinary look at the many aspects of wood construction over the past three hundred years.The IBOIS Notebooks offer a societal, ecological, cultural, and political look at wood construction. Through the work and critical analyses of authors from various disciplines, these notebooks reveal the structuring, sometimes contradictory, and often underestimated role of timber construction in the architectural evolution of the last three centuries. This biannual editorial project, led by Christophe Catsaros, philosopher, journalist, and architecture critic, and Yves Weinand, architect-engineer and director of the Wood Construction Laboratory (IBOIS) at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), draws the outlines of an original and transdisciplinary account. Going beyond the established distinction between the humanities and applied sciences, the notebooks offer alternative relationships for innovative wood construction. Behind this original and cross-disciplinary panorama—where researchers, builders, and historians question the potential of a material—is the ambition of a radical change, as evidenced both by the research and the achievements of the EPFL’s Wood Construction Laboratory.

Michel Desvigne is the most renowned French landscape architect in the world. Based in Paris, he has held guest professorships at such distinguished institutions as the Architectural Association in London and Harvard University. Desvigne’s projects have a strong strategic and conceptual component. Urban infrastructure projects play a major role, and emphasize the urban planning and design expertise evident in his landscape architecture.

The book documents ten of Devigne’s major projects from France, the US, Spain and Qatar, in which he is responsible not only for the landscape architecture, but for coordination of the entire project. How can such highly complex projects be realized? What does the intellectual thought process look like? What specific problems arise in their realization?

Michel Desvigne ist der international profilierteste französische Landschaftsarchitekt. Ansässig in Paris, hatte er Gastprofessuren an der Architectural Association in London, an der Harvard University und anderswo inne. Desvignes Projekte haben eine starke strategische und konzeptionelle Komponente. Eine große Rolle spielen Verkehrsprojekte, die die städtebaulich-planerische Kompetenz seiner Landschaftsarchitektur unterstreichen.

Das Buch dokumentiert zehn Großprojekte Desvignes aus Frankreich, den USA, Spanien und Qatar, bei denen er nicht nur für die Landschaftsarchitektur, sondern für die gesamte Projektleitung verantwortlich zeichnet. Wie lassen sich solche Projekte hoher Komplexität realisieren? Wie entwickelt sich der intellektuelle Gedankengang? Welche spezifischen Probleme stellen sich bei der Umsetzung?

Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. Emulating the detective novel, the focus is on actual buildings rather than on speculative designs and theories. The style and form is fresh and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, the second book in the Gumshoe series, Lytle Shaw conducts an investigation of Oscar Niemeyer’s building for the French Communist Party’s (PCF) central committee in Paris.Designed in 1965, just as party theorists began to rethink many bedrock assumptions about representation, Oscar Niemeyer’s PCF building is a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s. It is also a literal Marxist structure that can thus help us concretely picture just exactly what Structuralist Marxism might have been. Shaw draws out the PCF’s language and context one element at a time and puts the elegant curtain-wall building with its cave-like assembly hall into revelatory dialogue with interlocutors in film, philosophy, anthropology, and politics.Perhaps the ultimate mystery of the communist cave is that its owners have not more often and more powerfully presented their landmark building as the vivid source of imagery it could be for the kind of world the PCF might like to construct.