LES VIGNES BLANCHES, CERGY-PONTOISE

No, I am not going to draw up a theoretical text on urbanism, but rather relate an actual experience and then deduce from it a few general words.
BANAL
'Banal, banaux: that which pertains to a public announcement; public or common kilns, mills, the people of which served a manor lord to whom they paid rent.'
Banal is thus machinery which not only everyone may use but must use. The pejorative derivation of'banal' - 'vulgar', 'common' - is significant: from it one marks the divergence between cultural classes, between the sublime and the vulgar, between submission and cooperation, between domination and participation, etc.
Those who treat banality pejoratively wish to impose great authoritarian schemes and to order all the details of form; they speak of great architecture when it is rather a question of expressing the power they have, and they efface many great contributions, even those that may be mature and responsible: it is diversity which is the enemy.

The Competition
1976 - We were one of sixteen prize-winners in the competition 'City Dwellings' in Hautil, held by the new city of Cergy-Pontoise to the west of Paris. A district committee was already acting on the New City and persuaded it to explore the course of community participation and of evolution after construction. And the New City had authorised by statute that during the course of several years the purchasers would be able to transform and construct annexes of up to half the original surface (would they build a new shanty town?). Worried about finding architects who would respond to this, and knowing our interest and experience, the New City invited us to participate.
Visits to Cergy (how do the inhabitants of a new city live?), then staying in the house of an inhabitant, debates with other architects who wanted to do everything together... Then back in Brussels, too far away, we preferred to draw up our proposition after what we had seen of the site, simulating amongst ourselves the possible intentions of the inhabitants and the negotiations of the neighbourhood. Each one of us took a house, projected his personal views onto its organisation, its dimensions, and its uses; and then, with simulated 'neighbours', tried to organise communal actions. All of it resulted in an image, after all rather life-like, of diversity and cooperation between objects: its very disorder exorcised predispositions that may have been too mechanical or too personal.
Slightly foreign, we happily served the project because we had received the most beautiful terrain right near the village of Vincourt: it had been refused by a powerful developer because the gradient towards the Oise River was too steep and car access seemed insufficient to him…

The Participants
A little too hastily we had declared: 'no inhabitant, no plan'. But in a new village inhabitants are hard to find: we asked the Town Planning Office of the New City to introduce us to families who had come for information about the possibilities of purchase or the location of the New City. They procured for us a list of about 30 eventual inhabitants. We wrote to each one of them that some architects wished to make contact with possible inhabitants in order to avoid false steps, and then we telephoned several of them to find out if they would come to a meeting. And with a big model and numerous documents about the context and possibilities, all the working stock to register their expressed wishes, we went to the rendezvous one Saturday afternoon in September.
No Inhabitants, No Plans
And no one came. Because of the date, the time, the place, the text of the invitation, one didn't know. Deceptive reflection each had his own. Rallying to the defence, I said to myself:' absurd': turned around on the autoroute to see again the terrain which, to me at least, was a reality. By chance I returned to the house of a wine merchant who lived in an old farmhouse in the village of Vincourt adjacent to our terrain. In his cellar, I chose several bottles. I would return in two weeks.
- Wait, is you from nearby?
— No, I'm an architect and . . .
—Ah! I'm glad to see you. I've got a wall, I want to buck it up but everybody criticises me. Besides, we've started a small association which protects the character of the old village.
I was offended:
— In the face of 2,500 projected lodgings to be built, you'd scarcely know it.
I explained to him my aborted meeting, our intentions of letting the inhabitants decide. He was amused:
— People like you, you buy two bottles from me just to ask if there's something interesting in the old village or the New City. And I say no, it's ghastly. But from now on I'll send them to you.
Two weeks later we held the first meeting in his kitchen: two young married couples, eventually interested, and for the rest, some inhabitants of the village itself.

The Meetings
Someone said: 'I'm going to talk to Gaby' (the mayor), and the second meeting took place in the town hall. We wished to meet the mayor without passing by the administration of the New City with whom he was in conflict: now he would no longer confuse us with it since we were 'from the village'. Then we spent a Sunday morning in the market of Ccrgy-Pontoise to explain to passers-by how we took account of and listened to their intentions. Little by little, some took what we said to others and our list of invitations grew.
Certainly the inhabitants' intentions, existing or future, were never surprising: they were even easy to guess. By contrast, the gravity of these intentions we couldn't guess at or even have had accepted by the authorities. These intentions concerned at first the tragic separation between the new installations and the ancient village, marked by the very sharp differences between the architecture, forms, texture, etc. and by a strongly resented lack of communication between the two zones, especially the car and pedestrian zones, and equally by a lack of physical contact. The general plan installed a green zone between the old and new parts, a zone resembling the zones sanitaires, the empty zones surrounding colonial towns. The plan of the new town, well done from many points of view, was fatally egocentric; it spontaneously placed its centre of interest in the middle of its new installation, and as for respecting the existing neighbourhood, it avoided it and threw the latter off balance (that is part of the definition of South African apartheid).
The mayor's office realised that for the first time it was listening to inhabitants of the old village and of the future one amicably discussing their future relationships and building them together. That was a change from the conflicts where the villagers had blocked the new administration office with their tractors.

Instinctive Urbanism
When people enter a room as a group, they situate themselves through rapport with others of a similar character near the exit, along the walls, near the window, towards the centre, turning their back towards others, in the corners, and even at the very back in order to see without being seen ... It is this instinctive manner of situating oneself that creates the form of the group in its space, it is this which has created villages, important cities and ancient towns. From a fabricated urbanism, this no longer seems thinkable: we rediscovered it by chance, letting things happen, because it isn't contrived or provoked.
The definitive plan, other spaces formed themselves, the lots were turned over a little once more. Families installed themselves, the neighbourhood traded, designing or choosing their models. Mister A7 definitely planted him- self and consolidated all the smaller parcels of land step by step. And while no one had a desire any more to modify the overall plan, it became definitive even if all the details hadn't been resolved. The perimeter of the first phase had simply included the territory reserved for the 43 houses without the workings of logic.
What had we heard, interpreted and proposed? A greatly detailed configuration with streets, pathways, of squares and cul-de-sacs producing a strong differentiation of contexts, densities, neighbourhoods, types and volumes of lodgings (led by the typologies of the families, their ages and diverse occupations, even if the range wasn't very wide . . . ).

Traffic Routes
The road system was no longer a ribbon but a space between houses or closures, a covering that engulfed the sidewalks in the same sheathing, without borders. The heavy route was marked out by paving stones placed in plots, their contour varying and responding to diverse situations and landscaping and, moreover, at a regularised distance from the axis. Traffic no longer impinged, pedestrians felt at ease. Landscaping amplified this.
During the course of the meetings, it was an inhabitant who proposed a connection with the autoroute below, on the network of our neighbours: we proposed it to the New City which then adopted it. A network of more closely woven pedestrian routes was drawn up and\ incorporated in the plans. It was the inhabitants of the first phase who had protected the ensemble of three phases in general lines, then their lots in greater details.
How did we find ourselves? Before tracing anything, wondering why that must be right (or even drawn...) or re-peated? What was a rule, a mistake? One illusion to get rid of: this participation was not laissez-faire no matter what, no matter how. But before deciding or roughly imposing the organic solution, there was some difference (in our situation it wouldn't produce itself spontaneously any more). Following this to propose a form that was both fertile and compatible: that was already architecture. It would welcome the diversity of cultural images, by continuity, by contrast, occasionally by conflict but without annihilation. A compatible society.
The artifice of property developers was insupportable, even a finishing that was well- composed or disguised under the cheap finery of classicism. The anti-establishmentarians of yesterday are the powers of tomorrow and are preparing themselves to be as annoying. It is no longer possible to model oneself on either commercial models or the heroic gestures of theoreticians. It does seem to us, however, legitimate to conserve through the maladroit reactions of groups the contradictions, the hesitations, the misfiring, the multiplications, the super- impositions; the piracies, the atavisms, the non-sense, the juxtapositions, the inequalities, a finally all that which forms an urban texture, the absence of which attains only the level of a boarding school model or that of embellished barracks.
For lack of place, all our meetings were collective: at the beginning some were discreetly set aside for interviews with others. Then the participants got to know each other better, helped one another and created a collective dimension.
Seated with us in a cafe after one of the meetings, Mr C got up, excusing himself: 'look, there's Mr L passing by, I'll go say hello. He's my future neighbour.' That seemed normal, commonplace. Mr L worked in a nursery; if he saw any sick plants in public spaces, he would replace them as soon as possible.

Ecological Intentions
Some architectural students were sometimes invited, throwing into the discussion such themes as ecology, solar heating, of possible cooperatives, in general well received but thought too expensive. Apart from small vegetable gardens (but the terrain was rather scanty), we had above all proposed a general overgrowth of all possible plants, large and small trees, trailing plants for hard surfaces, on the hedges, etc. Apart from the regulation trees, we submitted to the inhabitants varying species, but their botanical knowledge was insufficient to raise a real discussion.
The gardens enterprise deceived us a bit, and we planted exotic species, now no longer sold. When we asked one of the inhabitants to replace them with familiar local species, he proposed to keep them: 'they're in Martinique; we'll call that country . . .’

The Stream
The water from the roofs was drained into a sort of stream/ditch, rather a string of small dams, slightly waterproofed, which could shelter more aquatic plants than elsewhere. At the bottom of the stream, it was too full towards the sewer. Some were enthusiastic; some feared that people would throw dirty papers into it. They were slightly mollified to recall that at least they would have the power to bank up the stream and to replace it with a pipe, since they formed a cooperative and managed their public spaces.
They had to rescue the authorisation for it from the city, then that was suddenly ineffectual: the water detoured by construction was not directed towards the stream. It is now a little vague terrain, incomprehensible.
A few amiable critics said about the organisers: 'this isn't self-management. And anyway, self-management isn't possible. Good. Because I've tried self-management in youth movements, university groups, my own students ... I no longer have the energy to form new friend- ships with neighbours and to find myself alone again with all the responsibilities, no." Besides,' added another, 'self-management that must respect all the laws and habits vigorously, that won't stand up. You see, I'm not even finishing the construction myself: someone will leave me out; some impediment will arrange that, etc
A very calm man, Mr A7, of Italian origin, came with his plan, very precise. He had chosen for himself the terrain in the centre, placing a square house with a hipped roof, well isolated on its parcel, on it, 'inviolable'. 'That will be good, with a projecting cornice all around.' The facade faced fully south onto the street, not one window, only an entry door opened with a beaded curtain for flies as in Italy. Fundamentally, the colour traversed the house and gave over to the three metres of the garden (and not an Italianate landscape . . .).
The rooms connected one to another (the model from his childhood). Hours of patient explanation with him, and as soon as one changed a few centimetres of his plan, he rectified it and took up again with an explanation: nothing remained but to amplify its character: we proposed to him a glass shelter over the entry door: 'Okay, with a lamp underneath . . . ', and designs for panels on the front door: 'that will be prettier.' The garage door was on axis: with a majestic double staircase. The lavatory was ventilated by a window toward the bath. He verified it, it was good. Long isolated in the group, he only spoke to us. But when his plan was completely designed and evaluated, he looked around him from his central house and established relations: he proposed that his brother, an entrepreneur in Rome, come with a truck full of flagstone paving for his neighbours . . .
Then some business disorder, suddenly he could no longer finance his A7 lot but reserved another one facing the first to keep the view. Then he gave it up completely . . . sad.
A woman showed us a property magazine. 'That,' she said, showing a narrow and pretentious L-shaped villa, a dining room far from the kitchen, skylights, etc... Then on another page, the floor of another house. That would coincide. We worked with her to collate one with the other and to adapt it to the terrain. We manoeuvred it a little so that she would understand the rapport with her neighbours and surroundings. There remain an arched entry and a skylight.
Another couple wanted to live by day on the first floor and sleep on the ground floor. The husband, moreover, was impassioned with the idea of decorating the facade with rose sandstone. We were sure of a contagion toward the neighbours. Perhaps we should have been able to work the exterior plastering with the workers, the inhabitants, the children, to give more poetic importance to the entry doors and to certain windows by playing with the thicknesses of paint coats, the edgings, the stoneware recesses, etc. It didn't succeed; too much, too costly.
On-Site Employment
Certain purchasers wanted to practise their 1 1-20 Design sketches employment on their lots: an industrial de-signer, a painter, an architect. At once the presence of local professionals broke the monotonous homogeneity of the residents and added to it a richness of different proportions. How to provoke it from the beginning? It was suggested to invite a doctor, a nurse, but how to lure them? Equally, where was the boutique seller who would sell everything, or a few older couples who would play the role of fond grandparents?

The Developer
It was only after we had led the first meetings ourselves and proposed the first general plans that a developer - whose role had been to start up, organise and manage cooperatives until the end of construction - became interested in the operation. A little official self-management. But we often went to the construction sites, because although the developer knew about cooperatives, he had forgotten cooperation. For reasons of his own ease or from fear of the co-operators, he remained as distant as possible and saw them only as ordinary buyers of a commercial product. The obligatorily opened books were clearly too complicated and so were closed. The developer nearly always responded to a question but at great length, and he took offence when someone got angry at a meeting. One day we asked him to distribute someone's address to everyone: 'you’re crazy,' he said, 'they'll meet him.' Used to mechanical operations, some of the inhabitants' awkwardness provoked such retort that altercations began. In effect, one knew that during the six months between the first really significant meetings and the decisions about the beginning of construction, the people would become discouraged, the group would break up and it would be very difficult to complete it. That, unhappily, happened to us: the developer didn't really believe in this manner of doing things and wanted only to fall back on his too bad habits,
We had always refused to change the houses designed or modified by inhabitants, even those who left; they had to be sold such as they were to new inhabitants. It was never necessary to erase the traces of the former inhabitants but rather add new intentions to them. In this way, certain houses were redesigned by three or four successive families and they conserved all these sedimentary beds of intentions. One obsti-nate misunderstanding: we were neither sociologists nor nurses. So much the better if families or individuals bloomed on these occasions but that wasn't our purpose. We tried simply to lead them towards an architecture which wouldn't prevent their way of life, which came into being by following their initiatives and which produced an image of realised pluralist responsibilities. We were not charged with the constitution and the health of the group of inhabitants (even if we were sensitive to it) but with creating with them and with craftsmen an architecture visibly more cooperative than usual. We had to repeat this every time other co-operators attached themselves to us. No longer did we have to impose 'architectural care' on frustrated people. So much better, »too, if they restructured a family pattern or even an active political implication, but that wasn't >our goal. Neither were an amateurish put-up job; and its ill-formed folklore. •

Evolution
"At Vignes Blanches, the inhabitants had the right to add annexes of up to fifty per cent of their initial surface (in all other operations the fixity •of the architecture forbade it). And if too little time hastened the course of construction, the .inhabitants themselves could add the shutters •they weren't able to pay for at the start, and in .several more diverse ways than what we would [have been able to do. The fencing and plantings were not achieved: the inhabitants began it afterwards and helped one another in the interior of their dis-trict. One kind of architectural aid would be to get the most important tasks into working order. >f it
Commercial Arguments
Our developer-foreman of the cooperative at first very feebly interested himself in our approach, his feelings ranging from mistrust to effrontery; our approach seemed only exotic to him, a financial and commercial difficulty. He hung onto his habits: heavily analysing a market, badly guessing the demand, blindly translating it into a few idiotic models that tried to be 'alluring', then developing a gross commercial effect in order to get rid of the 'product' and risk having to finance it for a few months or years... And without costly trademarks or sale offices, with only two or three discreet announcements, almost all 43 houses were already inhabited on paper before construction. Everything sold better than usual.
We aimed at serial construction, not made to measure (even if...); within the limits of actual procedures and in order to show that all the operations could be diversified in a banal fashion, repeated. (But it still wasn't proved...)
Better to single out mental laziness before complexities, the real costs. For example, a very disordered planting struck fear at first sight but in any case no more could be spent on it.
In some rather calculated prices, at least cost factor was strongly marked: houses (smaller than others), use of materials, dislocated volumes, and difficulties of construction or site. And understandably, better-chosen materials. One must confess that in order to respect budgets, we had at our disposal a slightly compromised construction which consisted of badly stacking breeze blocks, coating them, isolating them. Putting them on thin concrete flooring, a very tight framework in the trusses, ordinary roof tiles and standardised windows ... The least divergence was costly - but was it perhaps this that created the materials and traditional popular arts of former times?
We were able to negotiate the market with a small business group and to calmly discuss its prices over several months. Other larger groups had asked us: 'how many different models of the 43 buildings?' We answered: 'Forty-three.' They replied: 'No.'

Significance
We lost that slightly colonial certainty of con- trolling the whole creation of the built object, of controlling the total design in the manner of preceding generations of architects and planners. By contrast, we often had the occasionally annoying feeling of following a process that we didn't know well, the pictures of which only became apparent after the fact (like heaps of ruins where the logic of the plan is revealed only at a distance). Each time we passed near an ordinary building plot, we asked ourselves the same question: 'what difference has come out of our participation in Vignes Blanches? Perhaps the form produced by this sort of urban script, automatic and collective, that we raised, perceived and manoeuvred? Wouldn't it be better to be ignorant about how the action may end than to construct a too well known object, limited to it?
Always two tracks. On the one hand, the troop and rank, the sublime, the complacent and no longer rational leaders, driving back, even retrogressing, glacial. On the other hand (and it really is the other hand), the unknown of personal and group initiatives (and that risks being ugly!), the diversity which alone can allow popular instincts to peacefully develop today, the certainty that the organic is more fertile than the calculated But inspiration is necessary: a generation of know-it-alls has frozen inhabitants.
To order is a military act: to motivate is to be responsive and responsible. And then, friendly relations. 'They' know nothing. Models all done! Disorder. And the architectural act? And corporatism? Populism, kitsch, and not the responsibility of the architect?
What can one gain as an architect? Adherence to a more palpable reality, saying nothing about our desires to determine every- thing alone. Co-production of an image of a more lively network, escaping to a type of machinist architecture without resorting to the travesties of the eighteenth century or to annoyingly narcissistic or Mussolini-style engineers. In this sense, while a plastic dwarf or a flat tyre may appear, it's a sign of better health than the emptiness of great inert schemes . . .

All or Nothing?
We were reproached about this by purists who demanded (from other people, because they themselves would attempt no participation) if the participants at the beginning would be the same ones at the end of the operation: we would have thought so. But while the more personalised houses were sold first (the 'rogues', said the developer, who demanded that we replace them by 'models'), we saw that the city was already transformed by successive inhabitants, often even before being built, and that this dimension made a more collectivist texture than a collage of personal preferences.
And from a few other purists, the inverse reproach was simultaneously directed at us: the inhabitants had been manipulated by the architects. They were evidently right, but forgot that in exchange the inhabitants manipulated us also. They were certainly wrong to imagine that if we had been mute photocopiers the inhabitants would have designed houses in the shape of Mickey Mouse or boots. Not there. They projected their own myths: the real inhabitants showed themselves more responsible and more careful (we often re-gretted it . . .).
We often received angry letters with a list recommending urgent modifications: for the most part, 10 cm here, moving back the furniture there, don't budge the radiator, nothing spectacular. Once that was corrected, they really felt at home. And then. Without vigorous architects they would have simply repeated the immediate models and the bleak alignments of lots which one believes inevitable, so much so that one excavates only in the shameful motifs of engineers and geometricians . . .
Alas, if one can ardently hope for inhabitants, if we finally leave them to organise them- selves, they could continue to realise their initiatives . . . But by a curious misunderstanding, it isn't the inhabitants one listens to but those who make a profession of knowing better than they do.

Entropy
The vague participation which had overtaken the New City finally produced only a few things. Since 1976, several operations were debated in Cergy before getting bogged down. The first, vigorously led by a solid developer, didn't want to plunge into the experience without preparation and constructed about a dozen models which the future inhabitants could choose and modify as they pleased. But in the face of the reticence and slowness of possible buyers, the developer decided to multiply these 12 models without anything more and to sell them like cattle trucks. . .
Another experience, this one very successfully passing its first phase, was that of the Ateliers Communautaires (Community Workshops); they put several years into dispensing with developers, into researching their own purchasers, into redrawing their statutes, into working directly with them and changing con- tracts with businesses forming a cooperative founded for this reason. They actually struggled, eight years later, in the second phase of the operation, for which it seemed that there weren't enough buyers or somehow they weren't 'caught' or somehow the economic circumstances weren’t favourable enough.
We were the third operation, chronologically; perhaps it was because of the dislocation and disorder of our first developer that we succeeded in obtaining a rather strong participation but with very long delays and a great waste of meetings.
And then, element by element, the intentions of the inhabitants were suppressed by the developer. At first the bakery (it isn't our role), then the community hall (it makes noise) and the work places, then certain varieties of materials and colours (costing more), finally a few of the older couples, and finally no more participation, not even the arrangement of the third phase of 'operation Vignes Blanches'. If it had been well led by a competent developer it wouldn't have cost any more time or money. But entropy
Commonplace Community
This operation at Vignes Blanches had a remarkable characteristic: it wasn't a group made up of inhabitants who sought a communal habitation in order to shut themselves up in it; it was an open operation no matter what, where no one was chosen or refused, where no privilege was necessary to belong. Our inhabitants came from it didn't matter where, they simply wanted to live there without any other care except a very light communal one, to build good neighbourly relations: without obligation, without constraint, without rights over others heavier than those which were like any other urban district. Truly anyone could be integrated into this district provided that material conditions were satisfied.
These characteristics seemed essential to us because they distinguished us from other communitarian ventures, religious, political, intellectual, etc, which had been made to deviate from this notion of participating in the architecture of one's habitat, deviating from an indispensable banality, towards a mystique of communal obligation more or less manipulated or organised by 'charitable' specialists. Banality protected us from these suffocations, from these nostalgias for ancient forms of society and at the same time from that kind of architecture which produces authoritarian relations between the group and the people; banality protected us from the complicity of architecture with communal homogeneity: that is the difference between a boy scout troop and the bustling crowd of the market place . . .
This is not a criticism of communal or homogeneous architecture but simply a research with another object. This is a normal repeatable process, in no matter what contemporary circumstance, that by itself helps the urban tissue 27-36 Les Vignes Blanches, to grow and only avoids those 'building mercenaries' who immediately transform architecture into their technical or cultural image.

Success?
Despite conflicts, we were lucky to have a maladroit developer, sometimes well motivated, sometimes not; his lack of experience in participation (despite his role as organiser of cooperatives) simply left us alone: we were able to mollify him just enough in order to start the operation: he could no longer stop it. We see now that with a better organised and more solid developer, these attitudes probably would have been impossible. Or indeed, maybe it takes an innocent organiser, competent and angelic, but does one exist?
Despite the delays and dislocations, we feel that this operation had a certain commercial success: everything was sold and even faster than usual. We have to keep telling ourselves that an operation where open participation completely miscarried is still only one ordinary operation . . .
The little group of 43 families now live their lives. We returned there for the pleasure of it, even if there were many problems and minor faults badly resolved. We were on the watch for all personal developments and fixtures: there were several all around. Gardens had been organised, we found tomato plants in the ambiguous public gardens. Fencing grew every- where, copying our forms (or even better, they tried to rectify them), people came, improving the public spaces, sometimes privatising them, enlivening them, adding a few open sheds, a few awnings, a few annexes towards the gardens. They were often in each others' gardens, without avoiding neighbourly disputes. One of them worked in the business of concrete casting and showed me a model in classic form of a balcony railing that he had made for his ter-race. I said, •It's very good.' He proposed them to his neighbours: contagion. The house designed to the millimetre by the artisan of Italian origin who wasn't able to follow through had been repurchased by a Swiss couple, then by another couple. It changes every week.
One will have to return in twenty-five years.

Conclusions
This operation had been a difficult wager towards ethnology. We decided at first to put aside our personal style, and to adopt, not blindly but in friendship, the local banal style and the 'bad taste' of popular actors. Certainly we had our personal limits but they were enlarged by the wager: certain propositions we didn't sup- port, others we didn't perceive (our selective deafness . . .).
In all ways, from the beginning we projected a personal model but one which was undefined, more like an attitude; the model was then built progressively from discussions, was nourished by arguments and culminated in an organic form. This model was made from complexities, from non-repetitions and from a refusal to let a hard form dominate the landscape. It was inscribed by the inhabitants; it became their material and finally their architecture. It wasn't laissez-faire no matter whom or what or how but it was closer to the democracy that respects everyone (and throughout centuries, villages were admirably formed in this fashion). It was no longer a matter of designing one sole project, then manipulating the inhabitants so that they accept it. It was surely the two motifs, simultaneously. In this way one understands that with fewer inhabitants, one may have decided every- thing, and then all the projects would have resembled each other!
Equally one understands that the architecture of the first phase wasn't really different from that of the second or third, the detail of which was made without a single inhabitant. And that here, imitation was finally closer to the model and that attitude was more sincere than action. It is very difficult to do the decorative artifice since we wanted neither an angelic spontaneity nor a foreign object. We forced artifice to be a tool: we ourselves were artifice . . .
Our approach was above all that of the landscapist, therefore overall, relational, and of long duration. We say' landscape' in the sense of a complex milieu constructed by decisions that intersect, are multiple and woven, never by rules that arc rigid, 'right', or simplistic. Our approach was of long duration since v/e considered the past, the existing, the unsaid, like a texture upon which one sets a new project which is only one moment in history and which will continue to '"'' '^ evolve without us. Certainly this distanced us as much from other fabricators of artificial objects (High Tech or Walt Disney) as from equally artificial 'Roman' travesties (even if occasionally we had unconfessed sympathies with one or the other, if they were well done . . .).
This explains why we immediately turned the road systems upside down, the drainage system, the public spaces and their cunning authority over the landscape. Happily, here, we had an excellent and competent design team (and we often argued...). A dislocated road system permitted other spatial arrangements, other landscapes.
The form of Vignes Blanches is slightly 'animal', 'instinctive', with the necessary crude- ness. The houses possess a necessary banality and the games of chance of volumes involuntarily meeting (this upsetting was desired, not the detail of its effects). As soon as they entered their houses, the inhabitants began to improve them: it was well decided.
We rarely saw any other artificially organised place that developed with this natural quality. And I don't believe we'll find any other similar circumstances that would allow us to go as far with active inhabitants. Here we already needed the friendly protection of the New City and the mayor of Jouy-le-Moustier, and the ministerial subsidies to get there, because it's sometimes exhausting to persuade interventionists to act naturally . . .
Translated by Christine Murdock

Architectural Design n° 564 01/02/84 :
URBANISM