Jean Renaudie at Credac - Ivry, France

A recent show of drawings, plans and models by French architect Jean Renaudie (1925-1981) was proof that his buildings are too socially conscious and too formally weird to be ignored. The exhibition was actually sited within Renaudie's largest built project, the town center of Ivry-sur-Seine, which is a midsize municipality at the southern end of the #7 Paris Metro line. Contradicting all notions that public housing needs to be regimented and dull, Renaudie, a successful and influential architect in France in the 1960s and '70s, designed mixed-use villages in dazzling geometric forms. He firmly rejected the residential tower block then in vogue and called on architecture to address social and urban issues.

The models in the show, jointly organized by the Pompidou Center and the city of Ivry, span Renaudie's almost 30-year career. His first built project, a 1958 country house, shows the influence of Le Corbusier, but already displays Renaudie's interest in integrating abstract geometry and sloping terrain. The building consists of two modernist boxes perched on a hill and sensitively and sensibly connected by platforms. By the mid-'60s Renaudie had abandoned the cube as his architectural unit. A model from 1974 made of rough plywood and chipboard--nominally for a new city in Givers--is composed of star-shaped units that cover the table in a meandering crystal pattern.

In Renaudie's 1967 plans for an unrealized project in Vaudreuil, circles, arcs and triangles are densely, almost musically clotted together and rendered with strong black outlines and primary colors. As with many of Renaudie's quite abstract drawings, it is difficult to see how habitation could be extrapolated from such seemingly free-form experiments. More descriptive drawings show him taking up the specifics of the Vaudreuil site. Set on a ridge overlooking a lake, the proposed buildings, composed of arcs and facets, curve and rise in counterpoint to the terrain. These designs delight in an intellectual and ornate complexity--in spirit more like the chimerical Baroque of Borromini and Guarini than the simplicity of orthodox modernism.

Renaudie's plan for Ivry was conceived in the late '60s and built in three stages over the next decade. It contains some 200 apartments, dozens of shops, an elementary school and a two-tiered mall. Above the street rise hill-like stacks of angled terraces, in form not unlike 17th-century star-shaped fortifications. Interspersed among the terraces are three-story facades of polygonal windows above the pedestrian arcades. The structures are made entirely of cast concrete--not the most ingratiating of building materials, but one that allows the terraces to support enough soil for an array of vines, bushes and even small trees, giving the buildings an endearingly wild-haired look.

The vigor of the gardens is indicative of the residents' affection for their plot of earth in the sky. In fact, Renaudie himself lived nearly 10 years in this housing project. It's hard to imagine a prominent contemporary American architect wanting to design subsidized housing, much less choosing to live there. Instead, the pinnacle of architectural aspiration seems to be the museum with its baggage of social power and prestige. Renaudie's brusquely socialist architecture is hardly fashionable, but how refreshing to experience modern architecture that embraces social content and formal invention.

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