A number of recent events, which entailed the government canceling architecture rather than stimulating it, demonstrate that a fundamental change has come about in the approach to present-day architecture in France. In order to understand how the 'Grands Travaux' (1981-1995) could result in a period of architectural sabotage, one should consider the exercise of power in the current political system, the Fifth Republic. This constitution, tailor-made for General de Gaulle in 1958, restricts the role of parliament, but strengthens the power of the president. As a polity, the Fifth Republic traces a kind of arc: its birth under de Gaulle, rise and flourishing under Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, decline during Mitterrand's 'regal reign' and the collapse of the constitution under Jacques Chirac, an implosion of the political system.*1

This movement is followed by a line in architecture, ending at the insignificant place innovative projects are currently accorded. Here, architecture is linked to the authorities, by way of state commissions, regulations and all manner of interference. The greedy state has stopped a flourishing liberal economy from coming about, meaning that firms do not actively feature in public space and little of what is built is contemporary. French society, saddled with an outdated political system, cannot adjust to new developments and, as a reaction, focuses on the past, with historicizing buildings forming a fitting backcloth for that attitude.

It is impossible to meet the reforms required by European liberalization and globalized competition with the inefficient apparatus that the Fifth Republic represents. French politicians are aware of that and so offer the electorate impossible protectionist promises, vague ecological plans and cycle paths. The crisis in architecture can be understood when seen in a political context: bound as it is to the inefficient state machinery, it is also incapable of meeting present-day demands of the multicultural metropolis and citizens' expectations. Moreover, the influence of the strict hierarchy within the Republic explains the aversion to true democracy and participation, in architecture as well. Architecture is spellbound by power, hopefully awaiting the next overwhelming monument, the quality of housing or urban planning is the least of its worries. In other words: symbolizing façade architecture (treatment of the symptoms) is preferred to liveable spatial architecture (urban 'healing').

The authorities are also in charge of communication on architecture by means of exhibitions; it is either made for an elite – Beaubourg – or directed in propaganda terms by the city council – Pavillon de l'Arsenal*2: no effort is made to acquaint the general public with contemporary projects. The outcome is that the French house-owner, a hundred years after Le Corbusier raised the matter*3, still parks that piece of contemporary design, his car, in front of a home that looks as if it had been built in 1850. Contemporary architecture – monopolized by the state, as an art form reserved for insiders, and not promoted – does not even exist for the majority of the population.

From example to anti-model

There have been three key moments in the recent history of the balance of power between the state and architects. The first, between 1970 and 1977, was the unequalled 'acte fondateur' – the moment when president Georges Pompidou made the building of Beaubourg possible. This is the benchmark, the most important fact being that Pompidou knew politics could provide the stimulus but an independent jury must designate a laureate. Pompidou was not only aware that a politician should not judge the proposals, but also that politics works at a different level from architecture, that the latter starts where the former ends.
That altered during the second 'moment': during Mitterrand's administration (1981-1995) architecture would seem to have experienced a heyday, praised in countries where an 'excess of public participation' was felt to hamper the building of monuments. As if Mitterrand's buildings were not symbols of wiretapping of the press, murder of a Greenpeace photographer, refusal to take action in the Balkans and generally 'Bad Government' that reduced the country to poverty. Although some 'Grands Travaux' would seem to be a success – the Louvre, the Parc de la Villette – the profession paid a heavy price: a shift in the relationship with the client, in which the politician subordinated architecture to short-term thinking and electoral interests. Unlike the procedure with Beaubourg, under Mitterrand architecture competitions were decided in nebulous procedures and this resulted in the Opéra Bastille and the Ministry at Bercy. This political annexation of architecture was an example for national and local politicians, who, without any expertise, today still decide who will build what and where.
The 'Grands Travaux' were realized at the expense of more urgent issues and real challenges: harmonization of space around inner-urban areas, and housing and living quality there. Moreover, with the state as the chief client, a split occurred between the public and private sectors. Architects started focusing exclusively on the authorities, which ordered buildings 'with one hand' and with the other publicized and won admiration for the self-same built designs, in publications, exhibitions and awards. It was no longer possible to carve out a career outside the many-headed state. The philosopher Yves Michaud described the same mechanism with respect to contemporary art.*4 The government as the supreme collector hampered a free art market and ensured that French art, as controlled by civil servants, had little international clout.

Sabotage

The erosion of the profession that Mitterrand started was completed during the third 'moment': the presidency of Jacques Chirac (as from 1995). This is the 'Anti Travaux' time – the state is now creating a quantitative and qualitative deficiency, thwarting ambitious architecture. A sabotage in which politics cancels projects for electoral reasons, or deliberately forces them down to low architectural quality, towards a style that harks back to the past.

It started in 2002, when Dominique de Villepin (today the country's Prime Minister), having taken office as Minister of Foreign Affairs, discovered the winning model of a design competition – and cancelled it. The commission was for the embassy in Tokyo and, following the standard procedure, had been awarded by the jury to Du Besset – Lyon. De Villepin did not like the winner and arranged for a second competition, which was won by Francis Soler. Once more Dominique de Villepin intervened, passed over the jury and personally announced the winner to be the practice that had come in third: Brochet, Lajus and Pueyo. Time-consuming appraisals by two jury committees, months of work by the first five, then four practices, were subordinated to the whims of the poetry-publishing politician.*5

The second stage, in December 2004, was the disappointing result of the competition for Les Halles, a project that might have portrayed the metropolitan dimension of Paris. The existing Halles were the outcome of the urban policy of Jacques Chirac, who had long been the city's mayor. In 1977 he orchestrated the combination of an enormous underground station beneath a layer of postmodern buildings. The materialization of the new project had been an electoral promise of the current Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, who wanted to break away from Chirac's legacy. The architect Françoise Fromonot reconstructs in her investigation 'La campagne des Halles' how Delanoë was able to choose the halved project by Mangin rather than the OMA proposal, which many Parisians considered the best solution.*6 She gives as reasons for that choice Mangin's solid networks in the government, the fact that his project blatantly plays along with local or environmentalist interests, and his book that the Ministry of Culture had financed and in which Mangin advocates a city of 'libertaire socialisme'.*7 His acknowledged aversion to commerce did not prevent Mangin from pandering to Unibail group, the all-powerful owners of the underground shopping mall, allocating them more commercial space and mandatory passages along the shops. In fact, Léon Bressier, Unibail's CEO, is said to have threatened to 'declare war' on Delanoë if the OMA project, offering the possibility to circumvent the shopping precincts, was selected.*8 Fromonot describes how some people saw the result as a nationalistic 'revenge on globalization', since the French 'No Logo' activist David Mangin had won from the theorist of international shopping, Rem Koolhaas.*9 That design competition was also adjudicated by the mayor; no jury was asked to clarify the projects with expert appraisals. Rather than breaking with Jacques Chirac's policy, Delanoë has resorted to the same compromises, has caved in under the same economic pressure and, like his predecessor, lacks architectural ambition: left- and right-wing, embedded in the same governmental mechanisms, arrive at the same urban policy.

Boulogne murders Billancourt

The next fiasco presented itself in May 2005, when the cancellation of Tadao Ando's museum for Île Seguin was announced. The billionaire François Pinault had planned a 33,000 m2 museum there, and the Boulogne-Billancourt municipality, together with a property developer, was to design the rest of the island, where the remains of the Renault plant stood. Earlier, in 1999, the star architect Jean Nouvel had published a visionary article on Île Seguin entitled 'Boulogne murders Billancourt'*10, in which he listed all the arguments to activists who would be pulling down Tadao Ando's project in the future: the new buildings on the island should 'bear witness to the working-class past' of the state-owned factory and so be 'contextual'. Four years later, residents' associations, armed with Nouvel's article, accused the local council and François Pinault of 'squandering Renault's industrial past'. The mayor was sensitive to their arguments and planned an iron curtain round the island. When environmentalists demanded that a court forbid the urban masterplan, Pinault had had enough of the local authorities, the residents and the ironworks and took his art collection to Palazzo Grassi in Venice, where it was welcomed with open arms.

Both the mayor of Boulogne and the Minister of Culture reacted laconically to the cancellation of what was to have been a second Beaubourg, 'because, as representatives of the government, they had no influence on private projects'. The political figures seemed relieved the private initiative had failed, proving that only the state could deal with art. In an area in which the authorities in other countries serve as a stimulus, here it is an active participant, a jealous stakeholder frustrating private initiative.
It now became clear how the misunderstanding could persist that the French public government was a patron of the arts, an idealized view that came about while in other countries budgets of well-operating public organizations were being cut or their tasks shifted to the private sector. The misunderstanding is based on the fact that government bodies in France have nothing in common with their counterparts in the Northern welfare states, none of which have such a dominating, centralized form of government. The French state is an economic power, providing work for 27% of all active, six million employed people – and thus creating a gigantic state debt. In cases where, in a welfare state along northern lines, the government organizes public space, monitors housing quality, the French state's 'service publique' outside the urban center merely makes for fragmentation and decay – indeed, the characteristics of urban anarchy of the most liberal economies. So – ultimate irony – the only thing that can be compared with the material, visible result of the dominant state in France is…the urban impact of the North-American liberal model. The economist Eric le Boucher suggests that of all socio-economic models there are two that, in their wealthy margins, produce so much social suffering: the North-American free market model and the French state model.*11 Governments in northern welfare states have stimulated architectural quality in their traditional commissions and sought to distribute that fairly over the population and the territory. The French state misuses architecture as propaganda, reserves architectural quality for itself and, as is apparent from Île Seguin, even sabotages possibilities for private corrections because it is the ambition of the servants of the state to play a role in society, rather than watching from the sidelines. Consequently, the state in France and the government of a northern welfare state are 'unequal quantities', which happen to have the same designation.

Guilty architecture

In the final act, the political Establishment's denial of the importance of architecture was also to play a part. On 6 July 2005 it transpired that Paris, the favorite to host the Olympic Games in 2012, had once more missed out, despite gigantic promotional investment. That unexpected failure might be seen as an act of architectural revenge. The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë had been confidently saying for months that his low-profile, ecological project would set the event in the human scale, without architectural excess. After all, Paris was not London that overdid things with all manner of tall and ambitious buildings. That must have been the first time a mayor had used the absence, the invisibility of architecture as an argument for a city's eligibility. And that is exactly the attitude with which Bertrand Delanoë is causing the center of Paris to resemble Aix-en-Provence more and more each day. Once more, the no-architecture strategy proves that the politician sees both the city and the world in terms of immobilism and the past.*12 In a country in which the powerful government always points towards 'context', new architecture is suspect, it must justify itself, embark on self-censure. So also in terms of form many built projects would seem to have been determined by the power of the state. The state justifies its existence, despite the lose-lose situation of soaring taxation and 10% unemployment, with a propaganda machine that suggests the world outside France is a jungle and only the government can maintain the national 'privileges'. The influence of this ideology can be perceived in architecture, with exaggerated attention paid to 'the past'. Jean Nouvel's recent 'Louisiana Manifesto' is a repeat of anti-modern state propaganda in architectural terms.*13 It is clear from his text and from David Mangin's previously mentioned book, that these architects cannot assess French urban reality: the uniform architecture they both describe as being the result of globalization is not that of the free market, but architecture from which the guts have been sieved off through the influence of the French Colbertist state. The recent Parisian district around the Grande Bibliothèque is an example of that approach: it is a formal idiom emanating guilt, not confirmedly contemporary, like a kind of smoothly-clad Haussmann referring shyly to the context in order to 'justify' its existence.

It is difficult to imagine how architecture in France can recover without ridding itself of the power of the intrusive state and the tradition of the 19th-century Beaux Arts, that is maintained by annoying reglementations. Within the profession there will have to be a debate between the 'contrite context' and 'complex-free contemporariness'. The fact that OMA's project for Les Halles was not selected for obscure reasons, and that an inefficient government allowed Tadao Ando's museum to be dropped, hit many people in France hard, and set off the debate. The discussion concerning the place of architecture within the French political power structure cannot be detached from the two larger dimensions in which it is embedded: the modernization of Paris and the reform of the state. If Paris is to grow and renew itself as an important metropolis, that can only be done by unifying the historic heart with the poor areas around it which are now separated from the center by fortifications in the form of the Périférique ring road, and thus creating one Greater Paris. New high-rise buildings are the only way for the center, which is relinquishing ever more of its residential function, to get going again. And reform of politics and the state can only occur in a more democratic Sixth Republic. Mangin's project for Les Halles expresses the opposite: that everything should remain the same, that green should be a reference to André Le Nôtre, and that the poor immigrant population of Greater Paris should not surface in the historic center.

© Steven Wassenaar

*1. Nicolas Baverez, La France qui Tombe, Perrin, 2003, or Arnaud Montebourg, Bastien François, La Constitution de la 6e République, Odile Jacob, 2005.
*2. For instance, the exhibition 'Actualités Parisiennes II', from 20/10/2005 to 15/1/2006 in the Pavillon de l'Arsenal is intended to make up for the double fiasco of 'Halles' and 'Olympic Games'.
*3. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 1923, reprint Flammarion, Paris, 1995.
*4. Yves Michaud, La crise de l'art contemporain, PUF, 1999.
*5. The court case initiated by the architect Francis Soler against Villepin's decision, was decided in Soler's favour by the Conseil d'Etat, the highest judicial body.
*6. Françoise Fromonot, La Campagne des halles, les nouveaux malheurs de Paris, La Fabrique Editions, 2005.
*7. David Mangin, La ville Franchisée, formes et structures de la ville contemporaine, Editions de la Villette, Paris, 2004.
*8. Frédéric Edelmann, 'Une ambition nationale pour les Halles', Le Monde, 15-12- 2004. He writes 'Unibai, a elle aussi exigé l'adoption du projet Mangin, menaçant dans le cas contraire de faire « la guerre » à la municipalité.'
*9. Françoise Fromonot, idem, p. 106.
*10. Jean Nouvel, 'Boulogne Assasine Billancourt', Le Monde, 6 March 1999, he wrote: '[…] nous serons quelques-uns encore à barrer la route aux bulldozers, à défendre l'image ouvrière, à réclamer l'inscription de l'île Seguin sur les registres de notre patrimoine'.
*11. Eric Le Boucher, 'Le modèle Français est facteur d'anxiété sociale, comme l'américain', Le Monde, 23 November 2005.
*12. At the Ministry of Culture the office dealing with contemporary architecture is called the 'Department of architecture and patrimony' and is headed by Michel Clément, a museum curator.
*13. Jean Nouvel's 'Louisiana Manifesto' was written for the exhibition that was organised in July 2005 in Louisiana Museum in Denmark;
it can be found at http://www.jeannouvel.fr/english/news/images/602_louisiana/ManifesteJN_EN.pdf