Spending the past six weeks in Paris, some random things occurred to me. This is a small inventory from the Paris night to surrealism and the architecture of Jean Renaudie.

Tour Eiffel by Armi.

Tour Eiffel by Armi.

The capital of boredom?

Le Monde recently wrote about Paris as the European Capital of Boredom (Paris, capitale européenne de l’ennui), comparing it to Berlin, London or Barcelona – cities “more cosmopolitan, more insane, and more free”. It referred to the imminent death of the Parisian nightlife due to the anti-smoking law resulting in noise on the streets and, ultimately, administrative closure of club nights as well as the low-cost aviation taking clubbers to the neighbouring cities (see e.g. Tobias Rapp: Lost and Sound – Berlin, Techno and the Easyjet Set).

However, I managed to come across some more institutionalised fun. For instance, one of the central figures of the Parisian night, the French composer and DJ Laurent Garnier could be found playing records at the Louvre. The evening, Inventaire avant disparition (Inventory before disappearance), was part of a series of events in the honour of Umberto Eco. It presented Garnier interpreting scenes from the silent film footage of the early 20th century life shot for philanthropist Albert Kahn’s The Archives of the Planet project.

Also, some weeks ago at Palais de Tokyo, a Boston band Prince Rama of Ayodhya played an evening of psychedelic folk surrounded by Paul Laffoley’s art brut, combining words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of utopia. The singer of the band, Taraka Larson, an assistant to Laffoley for four years, described how “the songs strive to reach infinite time”.

“To change ways of being, one has to first change ways of seeing.” – André Breton

One of the central figures of art brut was the French surrealist theorist André Breton, who believed that one way to discover who you are was to have your photograph taken. At Centre Pompidou’s La Subversion des Images exhibition, I saw Breton and his friends’ photos taken in the first photo booth, Photomaton, in the Paris of 1928. All the surrealists subjected themselves to the camera with their eyes closed, recognising “the omnipotence of the dream”, like Breton wrote in the first Surrealist Manifesto. These were photographs of dreamers.

Like the surrealists, also Jean Renaudie, the architect behind the social housing blocks of Ivry sur Seine in the suburbs of Paris, dreamt about changing life. Rejecting the structures of functionalism, Renaudie focused on creating housing that stimulated social exchange. The complex of eight buildings in the centre of Ivry from 1971 to 1980 must be one of the most interesting places I’ve visited. It proposes an alternative to classical and modernist urban spaces, offering different apartments for different people – all equipped with a garden terrace, and all mixing public and private space (see e.g. Irénée Scalbert: A Right to Difference – The Architecture of Jean Renaudie). Renaudie’s random room heights, shapes and sizes require the inhabitants to agree with a way of life, the apartments being stronger than them.

Renaudie believed in changing the social environment, and even social hierarchies, through spatial practice. However, the question is, does his architecture actually create behaviour or rather attract it, like my architect friend Pierre pointed out. Does the social housing at Ivry sur Seine actually change its inhabitants or rather bring similar souls closer to each other – more cosmopolitan, more insane, and more free than in Berlin, London or Barcelona?