Gangs d'architectes : une histoire critique de l'architecture postmoderne

Gangs of architects : a critical history of postmodern architecture

• Auteur / Autrice : Sophie Suma
• Direction : Daniel Payot, Alexandra Midal
• Type : Thèse de doctorat
• Discipline(s) : Arts visuels
• Date : Soutenance le 12/12/2018
• Etablissement(s) : Strasbourg
• Ecole(s) doctorale(s) : École doctorale Humanités (Strasbourg ; 2009-....)
• Partenaire(s) de recherche : Laboratoire : Approches contemporaines de la création et de la réflexion artistiques (Strasbourg)
• Jury : Président / Présidente : Florence Rudolf
• Jury : Rapporteurs / Rapporteuses : Caroline Maniaque-Benton, Jean-Louis Violeau

Mots clés

Mots clés contrôlés

Critique architecturale

Architecture -- Esthétique

Architecture postmoderne

Mots clés libres

Architecture

Histoire

Vie des idées

Critique

Vie collective

Postmodernisme

Architecture

History

Critic

Postmodernism

Résumé

La postmodernité, avec tout son attrait pour la contradiction, la réécriture des grands récits et son appétit démesuré de réussite sociale a achevé de parfaire la construction d'une représentation rigide et exclusive de l’architecte, culturellement préfigurée par des siècles de textes théoriques pensés et publiés par des hommes, puis par leur domination des réseaux. De ces sociétés masculines a émané une image culturelle de l’architecte, dont la posture et les pratiques médiatiques qualifient l’architecture postmoderne, et dont cette thèse propose une histoire critique. L'image du gang peut bien permettre de qualifier métaphoriquement les activités de ces groupes d'architectes américains qui sévissent alors sur la scène médiatique de la fin du siècle dernier. Par l'étude minutieuse des stratégies de médiatisation, et des documents visuels, télévisuels et textuels, ce travail de recherche s'inscrit dans les études de cultures visuelles.

This work proposes to pose the question of postmodernity in architecture, by reopening the file of the postmodern investigation already copiously instructed by several generations of philosophers and architects. It is a question of posing another definition of this architecture, by making it less of the stylistic and aesthetic analyzes to which we have been accustomed of whole chapters of the file, than of a moment of rupture, at the beginning of the 1960s, which manifests itself symptomatically in two issues of Casabella Continuità (1963) and Perspecta (1966). This rupture is reflected by a feeling, among the American architects who are presented in these texts, to be in default in relation to the aesthetic legislation that modernity has called for and that the CIAM have contributed little to codify and legitimize. The architects in question would be outlawed. This relation to the law, to the rule is in fact less literal than metaphorical. At least, this is what this thesis aims to demonstrate by studying a whole range of notions that seem to have been working on the field of architecture for over a century now, if we want to fit into the perspective of this report. the legality of the distant figure of the criminal Loos imagines in Ornament and crime in 1908. To understand and redefine postmodern architecture, to reopen this file far from being definitively classified, this work postulates the interest of unfolding the metaphor of crime, which, from the beginning of the twentieth century, combines motives (ornamental) with motives (criminals), and that too much of what will be called in the context of this search for gangs of architects It is for them, from the 1960s, to fight with modernism and reconnect with the collective. While unfolding this metaphor, which leads straight to the American architectural groups of the 1960s and 1970s, more theoretical than practical, reflective, critical and deeply engaged in controversies, it is the research itself that marks a certain inflection and which is necessarily tinted of a reflexive and interdisciplinary form peculiar to these same years. Following the trail of these gangs in the course of their criminal cases may well make this research an investigation, yet it is necessary to found such a method in a scientific approach and recall the theoretical frameworks in which this object - postmodern architecture and his representations - needs to be grasped. These frameworks are the result of cultural studies, the effects of which they record in the field of architectural research as early as the 1970s. Thus, this research work is considered in terms of critical studies in architecture, which, beyond postmodern subject, question the relevance and accuracy today.