Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (review)

Bobigny, La Courneuve and Sarcelles, as well as other planning projects such as Maine-Montparnasse and La Défense, constitute some of the grand ensembles constructed in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s that scholars have examined in order to understand the effects of national identity and political regionalism on the French urban landscape. Regulated by the administrative policies of Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, these housing prototypes of the Fifth Republic transformed the Parisian periphery into a series of "dormitory cities" composed of habitations à loyer modéré (HLMS), plunging what was to be ordered reconstruction into contentious social and economic problems. Topologies is another notable volume that contributes to the widening body of literature on postwar architectural history that reinterprets the technological thinking of French utopian architects, along with those such as Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, the Metabolists, Cedric Price and Team 10, who collectively foresaw the dawning of a new age, tempered not by revolution but by the scientific techniques gained from economics and the social sciences. The book provides detailed biographical information on the work of David Georges Emmerich, Yona Friedman, Claude Parent and Michel Ragon while contextualizing their building schemes of 3D space frames and networked agglomerations against the ideas of well-known theorists Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Johannes Huzinga and Paul Virilio, whose thoughts on consumer society, space, play and the body, respectively, inspired these architects' visions of the evolving city.

Despite other studies that have emphasized the polarizing events surrounding May 1968 or the widespread influence of the Situationists as indicative of the broader background underscoring postwar architecture, Busbea subtly proposes a more nuanced approach that targets the French architectural avant-garde's profound faith in technology, a flaw that blinded them to the changes implemented by mass culture and relegated their beliefs to symptoms of the greater historical moment. He cites Jean-Louis Cohen's assertion that French modernism's slowness and lack of progress compared to the social sciences developed into a sense of isolation from architectural developments in other countries as well as an interior isolation that defined architecture's distance from other intellectual enterprises [1]. Critic Reyner Banham proclaimed that the designs of the "urban spatialists" relied too much upon stylistic imperatives enforced through the simplification and flattening of the image. However, in denouncing a pronounced reliance upon visual formulations, Françoise Choay maintained that the designs of "technotopias" constituted an evocative field of interest for non-specialists. Busbea, in light of these critical perspectives, investigates the cybernetic and theoretical models that intrigued the French designers who privileged the forms of megastructures, attempting to reconnect architecture to the greater social meaning behind infrastructural systems; he carefully teases apart the political distinctions between seemingly similar architectural endeavors such as Constant Nieuwenhuys's New Babylon and Friedman's Spatial City. Visual artists Nicolas Schöffer and Victor Vasarely, who collaborated with Ragon, formulated a new "plastic language" for the changing conditions of the city, producing ambient environments, murals and paintings that addressed the phenomenology of perception and the semiotics of the urban landscape and collapsed the distinctions between art object and consumer object. This generation of architects and artists, born after Le Corbusier, sought to employ technology to eradicate the class struggle that characterized the ambience of France during this time period, balancing the ideals of Communist totalitarianism with the economic imperialism of the United States (p. 117). Utopia—a presumed interpretation that results from the images of Emmerich, Friedman, Parent and Ragon—-is framed rather as an intellectual endeavor by Busbea and not merely as an aesthetic practice residing in the expression of formal structures that embodied leisure, mobility and spatial dynamics.

While the book's chapters incorporate factual details behind each architectural group, they alternate rapidly between images of fantasy and research-based models of abstraction that serve as the basis for most of the built urban schemes. What is somewhat problematic...