"Modernity started out as a promise" states Jean-Louis Cohen, curator of the French Pavilion at the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition (until 23rd November 2014), in an introductory essay explaining the inspirations and contents of France's presentation at this year's Biennale.
That sentence is a wonderful starting point for many discussions: it may indeed be applied to art, architecture, design, fashion and to many other disciplines.
Quite often the promises made by modernity were in fact never kept or the expectations attached to this concept turned into confusing nightmares rather than into beautiful dreams.
Cohen uses this sentence to remind us how the original promise of architectural modernity was linked to rational and affordable dwellings and healthy cities or experimental construction elements, though, as the decades passed, things changed and modern cities often turned into monotonous complexes. This story is retold inside the French Pavilion in a clever way.
The pavilion is entitled "Modernity: Promise or Menace?" and in the first room visitors are confronted by a 1:10 scale model of Villa Arpel, the iconic and modernist protagonist of Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle.
The main character of this 1958 film isn't indeed the irresistibly funny Monsieur Hulot, but the exotic high-tech house with its arty fountain, cheeky winking "eyes", and temperamental garage door.
The villa should represent the epitome of modernity and automation, but turns for its residents into a symbol for a modern world that creates hopes and illusions, trapping people into a fake domestic environment and ending up manipulating the users.
Original drawings by panter Jacques Lagrange, the designer of the house who provided Tati with many ideas for accessories and sketches for his films, are displayed on the walls.
This introductory room is a perfect space for the fans of the film and architecture connection.
The second space is instead dedicated to Jean Prouvé, and to his building components and prefabricated metal houses, and includes eight original curtain-wall panels.
Though his lightweight structures inspired innovative solutions for iconic buildings such as Oscar Niemeyer's headquarters of the French Communist Party, the building industry favoured heavy concrete systems, like the full-size mock-up panels on display in the third room of the pavilion.
These structures call to mind the prefabricated heavy concrete panels conceived by engineer Raymond Camus.
His patents were exported and this meant that his panels were employed in the German Federal and German Democratic Republics; they were also produced in Soviet factories and exported to Cuba and Chile, where they went under the name KDP.
The fourth and last room focuses instead on the tragic metamorphosis of the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, a northern suburb of Paris built in 1934 by Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods, that, from path breaking housing scheme turned into barracks for the police force and was subsequently transformed into a Nazi detention centre for Jews destined to the internment camps because of its remoteness and seclusion.
The unifying element in the pavilion is a film by Teri Wehn Damisch screened in all the four galleries that incorporates archival documents, period clips and images showing Prouvé lecturing and drawing on a blackboard, Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle and Jean-Luc Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle films on a background soundscape of noises from construction sites.
The French Pavilion received a special mention at the Biennale "for addressing the successes and the traumas embedded in its utopian visions of modernity", and - we may add - for doing so in an ironic and cinematic way. Rarely has the ambiguous modernity we're living in been presented in such an intelligent and approachable way.
(Final note: Thanks to Abvent's iVisit 3D technology, visitors can virtually explore Villa Arpel as well as the French Pavilion).
Image credits for this post
2. Villa Arpel, Mon Oncle, 1958. Jacques Tati, director; Jacques Lagrange, designer. Frame © Les Films de mon Oncle.
3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11 Photographs by Luc Boegly.
6. Jacques Lagrange, drawing of Villa Arpel for the film Mon Oncle by Jacques Tati, 1958, ink on paper, private collection, courtesy of Hyacinthe Moreau Lalande (original size 21 x 29.7 cms).
8. Jean Prouvé giving a lecture at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM, National Conservatory for Arts and Crafts), 1968, private collection © Edmond Remondino, courtesy of Dominik Remondino.
12. "Concrete, the Radiation of French Thought and Creation in the World", in Cent ans de béton armé, 1849-1949, Paris, 1949. © Reserved rights.
13. L'architecte et son temps: Jean Prouvé, Hubert Damisch, J.M Leuwen, H. Damisch and Stanislas Faure (1973) © Institut national de l'audiovisuel.
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