Permitting diversity and complexity in Public housing

Jean Renaudie’s proposals for the urban renewal of Ivry-sur-Seine and other projects around 1928 portray a sense of ingenuity in the design of public housing and draw an inspiration from structuralist principles and his research in molecular biology.1 Renaudie addresses a deeper set of questions about qualities of a desirable dwelling, spaces that give more importance to the experience rather than the prescribed function, and towards the individuality that each house provides to the resident. It was through his projects that the diagonal was brought into the planning of a housing unit, as well as the importance of terraces provided for each dwelling. What sets his work apart from the rest was the high level of standard set for each space that makes a house home. The rhythmic alterations within the configurations result in an almost impossible pattern that makes each of his designs unique. This gives a whole new identity and character to the field of mass housing which works its way through a combination of design sensitivity and innovation that is second to none. The essay aims at understanding and exploring the underlying notion behind the idea of indeterminacy through analyzing one of his buildings through re-drawing the units of Danielle Casanova and comparing it with another building in the same master-plan, the Le Liegat, designed by him and Renee Gailhoustet. It is through the mode of drawing that Renaudie achieved most of his ideas and this essay tries to build upon his initial sketches and find a pattern and the evolution of form, the missing piece that governed his design principles, as his work and architectural philosophy seems relevant to this day.

Introduction | Context

The suburbs of Paris faced an increasing demand of housing due to the everincreasing population around 1958. The period between early 1920s to 1960s was a transformational period in terms of the evolution of public housing as the government authorities deemed it right to provide better services like central heating and showers that were not a part of mass housing earlier. There was a shift in the type of mass housing from the ‘Grand ensembles’ 1 where State along with the contractors’manufactured large blocks of standardized housing units with little or no imagination or diversity in their inherent structure. It was during this period that Jean Renaudie, a French architect and a communist himself who had radical ideologies about the concept of the city created a set of drawings for the upcoming town of Le Vaudreuil. Contrary to the existing conditions in the way his drawings were reacted to, the drawings of this project were to be of a lasting impact in his future housing design schemes.

An architect who challenged the notion of grand ensembles, he portrays a robust approach in way he relates the structure of the city to that of a living organism , and of the building of an organ within itself made up of cells that evolve and multiply rapidly, creating unique forms and spatial experiences for the user. The complexity of the way a city functions is reflected in his drawings and eventually in his designs. But after carefully analyzing the complex drawings one sees an underlying simplicity, that is not governed by the segregation of spaces but by giving importance to the more qualitative aspects of the spaces and using an innovative grid as a underlay for the same.

Using a similar method that was used by the architect himself, the essay uses drawings and diagrams as a tool to get to the root of the guiding principle behind the intricate design of spaces that differed from one another in multiple ways.

The works done by Renaudie are interlinked and inspired from one another in a way that makes us understand his process of design through drawing, through overlapping layers of complexity. The characteristics of the drawings of Le Vaudreuil made by Renaudie give us a hint of his later projects, the overlapping of forms, the use of basic geometrical forms that combine together to form a bigger constellation of elements that would later shape the site. There are traces of pattern, repetition, consistency and geometry evident in these earlier drawings that somehow, seem to culminate in the drawings for the redevelopment of Ivry-surSeine, making it a long process of design development.