French Riots: The Architect Speaks

Architecture in some way has the duty to suggest behaviour...
Places are the portrait of communities, and if the place is impossible,
the community becomes impossible.
- Renzo Piano

Piano is a Paris-based Italian architect responsible for the Pompidou Centre, Osaka's Kansai Airport, the reconstruction of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, and more. An interview in today's Guardian notes that the French riots didn't surprise him; he attributes them to the misconceptions politicians have about the function of cities and their peripheries. "The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians... They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities." He adds that what politicians don't understand is that for a community to work it must be a place in which people work, sleep, socialize and, as he puts it, "merge" in some way.

Here's a 220-apartment low-income housing development his firm designed in Paris (19th arrondissement): birch trees, a central garden, the concrete structures disguised under a facing of traditional terra cotta tiles chosen for their warmth and "chromatic contrast" with the birch trees and grass. Every apartment has a balcony facing some part of the garden.

Note the size of the buildings: the normal Paris size (4-7 stories), homes on a human scale. And look, an outdoor space human beings might actually want to spend time in: a garden of trees and terra cotta open to the sky. And it's not just that this physical space is more responsive to human needs, it's also the message it sends to its inhabitants: "You may be poor, but you still matter enough for the rest of us to put some time and thought into your quality of life." Compare this with the Saint-Denis HLM in the post about housing projects; that place is just one big "fuck you" to poor people. Hmm. The next time Saint-Denis is working on its housing stock, they should give Mr. Piano a call.

"Ach," he says, "I am the son of a builder... I learned that, day by day, you make a better street, a better road, a better walkway, better houses, better something." His response to the high-flown theory that architecture is a form of sculpture: "Bullshit! Bullshit!"