STUDIO FLORENT VERDÈS

WE ASKED OURSELVES

WHO THAT CITY WAS ?

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At first glance, not very talkative. A bit annoying, even. Hard to understand someone who won’t speak to you. Some cities pull at your arm, Marseille twists it, Brest breaks it; Champigny, she barely touches it. A smooth crossing, uneventful — suddenly interrupted by a few relics gone astray from the modern movement: housing estates. Despite her silence, Champigny was shouting vertically the moment we reached the Mordacs plateau.

 

Mass-planned living spaces, monumental, symmetrical, standardized, repeated — orthonormal to the point of hysteria. In this neighborhood, sitting like an object, we could see the spearhead of an identity crisis: the perfect example of what came to be called the “model policy” in France. Who was behind this former swamp, flattened and buried under concrete in the late 1960s? The organization responsible: the SCIC (Société Civile Immobilière de la Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations). The SCIC, let’s remember, had imposed itself as one of the most influential players in housing policy and urban restructuring from the 1950s through the late 1960s. A company shaped by engineers, not architects Influential for the exemplary nature of its construction methods — as rationalist as they were radical. A methodology that became a model for most institutions financing and structuring the urgent housing policy that began after the winter of 1954. Certain statements made by SCIC leaders reignited our indignation and sparked the libertarian spirit behind our intervention. The gardens, enclosed by blocks of collective housing, are almost empty. Few people pass through — except to go to and from their homes. Meanwhile, the “no man’s lands” left aside between buildings are far more alive. Places of passage, of mischief; residents trace their own “donkey paths”, their curved streets. These unbuilt spaces defined the sites of our intervention — in continuity with the residents. We began by cutting into that horizontality, disturbing it, unsettling it — following the donkeys’ paths. Once the incision was made, a shockwave followed. The flat, dull ground revealed itself — and began to fall apart. Beneath the surface lay buried programs inspired by the search for neighborhood life, encouraged yet detached from the radical aesthetics of daily life. A nightclub, perhaps, or a market. Still, the underlying question of monumentality remains. Permanent, structured by volume, by the erasure of facades, by the hysteria of collectivity and those numbered doors. We don’t deny the response these buildings offered to the urgency of the housing crisis — what would we have done? But the relationship between the vertical and the horizontal, left for dead, produces only emptiness. An emptiness unfit for human scale. Because the monumentality born of these voids is not only suggested — worse, it’s sometimes put into perspective. 

 

The relationship between the Mordacs district and the Chennevières-sur-Marne hertzian tower (128 meters of concrete, 400 meters from the first housing block) is extraordinarily strong, and part of this perspective of monumentality. It builds, from every point of view, a monument in itself — erasing the quiet presence of a damaged, nearly forgotten war memorial. Built in 1972, the tower’s construction transformed the neighborhood deliberately. Its foundations face directly onto the first housing block. The line drawn between the two corresponds both to the tower’s central axis and to the exact midpoint of the 105-meter housing bar (52.5m / 52.5m). With our intervention — the cut, the nightclub — we fracture that relationship, shift the perspectives, soften this brutal yet aestheticized environment. In the end, the intervention becomes a tool a tool for deviating collateral monumentality, for revealing the ground itself, whose writing changes and adapts to the “curved streets”, those donkey paths.