which the other stages would emerge.

The Open
THE SPIRIT OF EXPERIMENTATION*
House has been reproduced in countless
*Future Cities; Experiment and Utopia in publications and has become the pro1ect that best
Architecture symbolized deconstruction. In 1983, Bernard
Tschumi built the Parc de Ia Villette in Paris,
Marie-Ange Brayer the first city park to accommodate a variety of
programme, both formal and functional. Rather as
Notions of utopia and experimentation in in Derrida's writings, Tschumi here applied
architecture have been the building blocks of the dissemination, contamination and dis1unction, and
FRAC Centre collection. It encompasses projects resorted to film-editing techniques to develop a
that symbolize radical architecture from the 19605 heterogeneous urban scenario; architecture as
to the very latest such work. Its extensive field event. Berlin City Edge (1987) by Daniel
of reference and its forward-looking dimension Libeskind, whose most recent projects include the
make it something of a treasure-trove of ideas Jewish Museum in Berlin and the planned new World
about tomorrow's architecture, a place of open- Trade Center in New York City, is one of this
ended reflection, which permanently questions and architect's most important experimental projects.
challenges architectural design procedures in ways By increasing the number of references, it is
that are both creative and critical. The FRAC presented like an urban palimpsest that is
Centre collection includes works by artists decipherable in its complex, sediment-like layers.
working in liaison with architecture and The 'architectural text, to borrow Libeskind's
architects' projects; hence, emphasis has, from words, encompasses all texts and all cultures in
its earliest days, always been placed on the their diversify and universality. The FRAC Centre
common aesthetic field likely to be shared by collection also includes important projects
artists and architects. issuing from Californian deconstruction - mainly
individual houses (Michele Saee, Morphosis, Eric
The beginnings of the collection were formed in Owen Moss).
1991, at the instigation of Frdric Migayrou, the
then new visual arts adviser at the DRAC Centre - The FRAC Centre collection has also turned its
the Orleans-based Regional Cultural Affairs gaze on the experimental architecture of the 1950s
Department - and currently chief curator of and 1960s in France. To this end, it has acquired
architecture and design (MNAM-CCI) at he Pompidou loner Schein's earliest plastic architecture
Centre in Paris. The aim, then as now, was not to projects and dwelling sculptures by Andr Bloc,
put together a record of contemporary advocate in France of artistic synthesis, as well
architecture, like some inert warehouse, or to as editor of the magazine L'Architecture
draw up a soulless inventory thereof, but rather dau1ourd'hui. Quintessential projects from those
to develop an interest in architecture as years, which have hitherto received little
experiment, utopia and research. Utopia here does attention, have also been included in the
not mean a denial of reality. On the contrary, in collection. We thus find a remarkable group of
the implicit crisis besetting the rational order, maquettes and drawings that illustrate the
it offers a critical glimpse of creative work and oblique function of Claude Parent and' Paul
its sometimes visionary dimension. Michel Raton, Virilio. Together, this groundbreaking duo
who defended this 'forward-looking architecture in championed a topological approach to architecture,
France in the 1960s, wrote in this regard: 'Unlike based on the notion of surface, something that
utopias of the past, present ones are almost all is nowadays being explored by all architects with
immediately achievable. access to digital tools. The FRAC Centre
collection thus proceeds by way of historical
In its early days, around 1991-92, the collection 'rebounds and 'comebacks, in addition to
turned its focus on deconstruction', which gained rehabilitations of architects, today reinstated in
acceptance in 1988 at New York's MoMA and duly the 'heritage' of contemporary architecture. We
acquired outstanding international projects. have only to think of the antecedence of Schein's
Gravitating around the French philosopher Jacques plastic cells, produced in 1956, the first mobile
Derrida, American and European architects, among autonomous housing units, well ahead of the
them Frank O. Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, projects of he Metabolists, and Archigram in
Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind, England in the early 1960s. 'One of he factors
stressed theoretical work and the conceptual justifying any collection is the world of
dimension of the pro1ect. Thus, for Peter comparisons that it suggests, writes Christian
Eisenman, it was more pressing to 'conceive' Girard about the FRAC Centre collection.
architecture than to execute it. In this respect,
Eisenman's Guardiola House (1986-88) presented the The issue of mobility and of an architecture
challenge of a 'textual' architecture, which without ties is one utopia that is a common theme
borrowed from both linguistics and psychoanalysis. throughout the FRAC Centre collection, from Yona
In 1982, the Coop Himmelb(l)au Open House project Friedman's Villes Spatiales to inflatable
separated architecture from any kind of plan, on architecture. From the early 1960s on, Pascal
the grounds that the former was generated by the Hiiusermann and Chanac developed an architecture
unconscious: a drawing made blindfold, like some that was at once organic and modular, made up of
form of automatic writing, would be the conglomerations of cells. 'Architecture for
'psychogram of the project its raw material - from everyone' was the creed espoused by loner Schein,
for whom the prefabrication of parts and
industrialization would enable everyone to have
access to a dwelling or habitat, mass-produced and
at he same time adapted to modern living. The
collection's line of development consisted in
making a synchronic cross-section in Europe, at a
given moment in architectural research, bringing
together, in one and the same collection, what
might well be regarded as the last avant-gardes,
the final encounter between art and architecture.
Major projects by Archigram (Peter Cook's and Ron
Herron's Instant City; David Greenes Living Pod)
were thus acquired, as were projects produced by
radical Austrian architecture (Coop Himmelb(l)au's
Villa Rosa; Haus-Rucker-Co's Pneumacosm; Walter
Pichler's La Ville compacte; Eilfried Huth and
Giinther Domenig's Ragnitz, Medium Total and
Floraskin). The megastructures, such as Huth
Domenig's Ragnitz, that appeared at the end of the
1960s were no longer updates of Gropiuss 'total
architecture' but were defined by their capacity
for extension and proliferation, by their
transformability. Architecture was no longer an
object, but an environment, a spatial field.
Italian radical architecture is likewise
splendidly represented in the FRAC Centre
collection, from Superstudios Histograms of
Architecture to Archizoom's Letti di Sogno (Dream
Beds) and Gianni Pettenas Ice House. The modern
avant-gardes did share a common creed, but radical
architecture no longer focused solely on irony,
provocation and syllogisms. What counted was no
longer the object but the situation and behavior.
Systems of productive logic for architecture were
mixed together; new forms of localism' emerged in
creative work.
The transversal evolution of the collection has
led it towards projects that are nothing less than
icons of contemporary architecture, resulting from
the varied range of their interpretations. So the
FRAC Centre owns, among other things, two major
works from Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York: ln
Flagrante Delicto and The City of the Captive
Globe. These drawings are narrative forays into
the 'urban congestion of Manhattan, into the
mechanistic subconscious of the City, which, for
Koolhaas, is represented by the grid, a fantastic
projection of all his experiments to come. In its
collections, the FRAC Centre also has one of the
most widely published projects in the world:
indeterminate Facade, by James Wines/SITE, built
in Houston, Texas, in 1975. This commercial
building, with its brick facade, which seems to be
collapsing in the urban space, suspended between
construction and demolition, raises the issue of
context, and for the first time in architecture
introduces the idea of indecision and uncertainty.
James Wines would refer to this building as an
'assisted readymade. This critical relationship
to the identity of architecture is probably what
encompasses the entire FRAC Centre collection,
from Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York to Daniel
Libeskinds Berlin City Edge.
Today, having issued invitations over the past
four years to some 150 different teams of up-and-
coming architects to attend the ArchiLab
conferences, initiated and produced by the City of
Orleans, the FRAC Centre is continuing to support
creative architectural work, exhibiting and
backing young architects, French and foreign
alike. In its own way, ArchiLab aims is to set up
a platform of contacts among a generation of
research architects from all over the planet. And
todays 'research' architect probably stands
somewhere between the quest for creative
specialness and the need for a network of words
and exchanges, between the responsibility of the
concept and the acceptance of the complexity of
reality (social, economic, anthropological).
Needless to say, the days of banners, flags and
manifestos are over now; there is no longer any
emancipatory task for architecture; there is no
universal theory, no ideology to revere, no
novelty to promote. In his Condition postmoderne,
Jean-Frangois Lyofard had already announced the
end of 'grand narratives. The doubts expressed by
the architectural avant-gardes of the 19605 about
functionalism and technology have given rise to
todays new form of architectural operativeness,
with a uniform leveling of procedures, systems of
logic and projects. From Rem Koolhaass dirty
realism to digital architecture, it is perhaps a
new form of transitiveness that is being
introduced, in its approach to reality that is
both local and global: an architecture with
'differential intensifies, which implode systems
and formal arguments, ushering in a permanent
questioning of the architects praxis. Instead of
acquiring isolated objects, the FRAC Centre
endeavors to present a project in its entirety,
from the earliest sketches to the final maquette,
so as to retrace the different phases of its
formulation and work through the architect's
design process. It is thanks to the unfailing
support of the AFAA that the FRAC Centre has
managed to show its collections throughout the
world over the past few years.
Architecture is not only what is built; it is also
a conceptual trajectory, the comparison of
concepts stemming from heterogeneous disciplinary
fields, which exempt it from all formal
unification and open it up to its future
development. This ceaseless exploration.