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OLD FRANCE CELEBRATED IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY. COMMONWEALTH ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTS STUDENT COMPETITION. PRITZKER FOR AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECT GLENN MURCUTT. AR'S REVITALIZING THE EUROPEAN CITY CONFERENCE. JEWISH ARCHITECT TOM KAY WRITES FROM RAMALLAH IN PALESTINE.

RECORDING OLD FRANCE

In 1851, five photographers were dispatched to various destinations in France by the Commission des Monuments Historiques, to make images of some 173 historic buildings and sites where restoration work was envisaged or had already begun: Roman remains, monasteries, churches, cathedrals, fortifications, chateaux and other buildings in public ownership. It was the most ambitious government-funded photographic survey of the period and it offers a startling fresh picture of provincial France as it was during the Second Republic -- that brief interlude between the fall of Louis-Philippe and the rise of Napoleon III.

First dubbed the 'Mission heliographique' in 1979 and since pieced together, it has now become something of a monument in its own right. The five photographers -- Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887), the Prussian-born Edouard Baldus (1813-1889), Henri Le Secq (1818-1882), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) and Mestral (about whom little is known, not even his Christian name) -- were all members of the short-lived Societe heliographique (1851-1853). The society's journal, La Lumiere, followed their progress and fuelled expectations of an exhibition and a publication. But the Commission simply selected and purchased a total of 258 images (negatives and prints) for reference purposes: 120 from Le Gray & Mestral, who had produced some 600 images between them, 92 from Le Secq, 46 from Baldus and none from Bayard, as he seems not to have submitted any.

La Mission heliographique, Cinq phogoraphes parcourent la France en 1851 (1) presents magnificent reproductions of many of the original images, including a few thought to be from the set Bayard failed to submit, supplemented by other examples of contemporary French photography. It also contains an illustrated catalogue of the 258 images purchased by the Commission and such complementary information as colour maps of the period overlaid with the routes the five photographers are thought to have followed (reconstructed from their claims for travelling expenses) and lists of the buildings they were asked to photograph.

Anne de Mondenard's text seeks to clarify the facts surrounding the 'Mission Heliographique' and to establish its place in a peculiarly French version of photographic history (William Henry Fox Talbot is misspelt and the images he made when touring France in 1843 are not mentioned, only those he made there three years later). The painstaking process of relocating all but four of the negatives and prints the Commission originally purchased is described at length, the photographs are discussed both in terms of technique and composition, but not nearly enough is said about the subject matter -- the buildings themselves.

Perhaps a French readership is supposed to know that the Roman temple at Vienne (photographed by Baldus) was about to be metamorphosed into a smaller version of Maison Carree at Nimes, or that the church at Parayle-Monial (also photographed by Baldus) was to be transformed into an idealized version of Cluny. But why did the Commission require photographs of at least 10 different buildings where drastic over-restoration by Paul Abadie (1812-1884) was already in progress or soon would be? (Abadie is not even indexed). And was Le Secq asked to photograph the church at Vignory (Haute-Maine) because the Commission approved, or disapproved, of the way it had been rebuilt by Emile Boeswillwald?

Each photograph sets the mind racing. For instance, the view of the west front of the former cathedral at Lisieux, reproduced on page 192, contradicts a gloomy prediction Ruskin made in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Having drawn one of the spandrels above the southwest entrance in August 1848, while touring Normandy with Effie, he used it for Plate VII and tells us it is from: 'one of the most quaint and interesting doors in Normandy, probably soon to be lost for ever by the continuance of the masonic operations which have already destroyed the northern tower'. The new tower appears in Bayard's photograph of 1851, yet Ruskin's spandrel is just visible -- still unscathed.

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France subsidized some of the research for the book on the Mission Heliographique, in connection with a major exhibition on the work of Gustave Le Gray. (2) A number of the original images of 1851 by Le Gray & Mestral are on show, as are many other photographs taken by Le Gray during his highly eventful life. Highlights include astonishingly large views of Paris, studies of trees in the forest of Fontainebleau (where he fled to escape a cholera epidemic in 1849), numerous seascapes -- some showing the French and English fleets engaged in joint manoeuvres off Cherbourg, portrait photographs of Napoleon III, the Empress Eugenie and their baby son in 1856, a balding Garibaldi and fellow redshirt General Istvan Turr in Palermo and evidence of their activities there -- barricades and war damage -- in the summer of 1860, and exotic subjects in Syria and Egypt photographed by Le Gray when on the run from his creditors. He finally settled in Cairo, where he died.

CHARLOTTE ELLIS

(1.) Antic de Mondenard, La Mission heliographique, Cinq photographes parcourens la France en 1851, published by Monum, editions du patrimoine, France, 2002; [euro]68.60.

(2.) The exhibition Gustave Le Gray, photographe (1828-1884) is at the old Bibliotheque. Nationale, Rue de Richelieu, Paris, until 16 June 2002. Bibliotheque national de France/Gallimard have published a lavishly illustrated catalogue-book, Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884, under the editorial direction of Sylvie Aubenas, [euro]59.95 until 17 June 2002, [euro]69.95 thereafter, and a postcard-sized fold-out book, Le Gray, L'oeil d'or de la photographie, by Syvie Aubenas, [euro]7.50.

All photographs from: Anne de Mondenard, La Mission heliographique, Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851

COMMONWEALTH STUDENT COMP

The subject of the sixth international student competition to be held by the Commonwealth Association of Architects (CAA) is a dwelling for a famous writer. Entrants must be studying architecture in any Commonwealth country at the time of submission. Site (and indeed writer) can be chosen by individual entrants. Among jury criteria will be response to local culture, site and resources, appropriate materiality and sustainability. Prizes will be [pounds]1200 (first), [pounds sterling]500 (second) and [pounds sterling]200 (third) with a bonus of [pounds sterling]200 for the best multi-disciplinary group prizewinner. There is a further [pounds sterling]200 for the best scheme entered by students in first or second years. The winners and a selection of other schemes will be published in the AR, which is supporting the competition. The international jury (which will include CAA president Philip Kungu of Kenya and Peter Davey, the Editor of the AR) will meet in early 2003 and prizes will be announced at the CAA Gene ral Assembly on 18 April in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Further details will be published shortly in the AR, and on our website www.arplus.com. In the meantime, individuals and schools can obtain registration forms from:

Sue Linning, CEO 

South African Institute of Architects, Private BagX 10063, Randburg, 2125 Johannesburg, South Africa

MURCUTT WINS PRITZKER

Glenn Murcutt has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2002, worth $US 100,000. He brings distinction and credibility to a list of previous prizewinners curiously mixed in quality, the first Pritzker having been awarded to Philip Johnson.

REVITALIZING THE EUROPEAN CITY

The AR's conference at the RIBA was a great success, attended by some of the most distinguished architects and planners in Europe. Sutherland Lyall reports on the morning of the event and Timothy Brittain-Catlin on the afternoon. Seele, the cladding manufacturers, generously sponsored the whole occasion.

The Architectural Review's mid-March one-day conference, Revitalizing the European City, packed the RIBA's 250-seat lecture hall. Among an impressive list of names the morning platform was made up of Renzo Piano, Meinhard von Gerkan, paying a flying visit between conferences with the mayor of Moscow (where Piano had also been several months before), Norwegian Niels Torp, who was working in Shanghai, among other places -- where the opening speaker, Anglo-Spaniard David Mackay, also had a masterplanning interest. None of these connections was coincidental. These are fully paid-up members of the masterplanning and architectural inner circle, which operates worldwide and, as they discovered, often in the same cities.

One observer at the lunch break casually summed up the collective message: 'We have serious reservations about very big/tall buildings in cities -- providing they aren't by us'. Piano has a very tall 'shard' up for discussion for a site over London Bridge and he was plainly bemused by the ferocity of the local conservative nay-sayers. Why, he asked, 'has London such a fear of modernity? Sure, modernity has been responsible for disasters. But if we give up we commit suicide. We have to survive. The only place we have left to develop our cities is internally. Now the implosion starts'.

Piano was referring in part to the creative deployment in Germany by von Gerkan of inner-city land which until recently had been occupied by railway stations, marshalling yards, power stations and warehouses. Coincidentally the practice is also redesigning the immensely complicated Lehrter railway station in Berlin. The von Gerkan & Marg practice offices in Hamburg are located in a former riverside beer garden and restaurant, an example of one of his main themes: converting existing structures. Others included the combination of different uses rather than the mono-functionalism of conventional zoning -- and the notion of what he called 'urban attraction' best illustrated by the dramatic leisure complex for the middle of Moscow, which he had been discussing in the Russian city the day before.

Niels Torp posed a number of relatively conventional questions, not all of them with answers -- Who owns the town? Who has the right to build? and so on -- and he warned against making facile judgments about a city from its plan.

He pointed out that, on paper, Barcelona (Mackay's home town) is a tight-packed and apparently boring grid -- but the reality is that it's a vibrant place. Here he introduced his notion of the urban section in which an understanding of the grain and texture of a city, its cross section, is crucial. As in the case of his annular masterplan for a satellite city outside Shanghai, the cross section is much more important than the formal layout of the plan. Torp kept his largely architectural audience on side by reminding them that they were engaged in a profession -- and also in an adventure.

You might expect David Mackay to have settled down to grand-old-manhood. Yet he was the only speaker to offer anything like a revolutionary masterplanning methodology. He embraces the reality that planning is a political activity which architects cannot wish out of existence. He is also deeply suspicious of the conventional notion that it is inevitable that you must first develop a plan and then guide and nurture it into existence. Those sorts of plans take 20 years to develop and are never implemented. What the masterplanner needs to do, as Mackay's practice has done in Barcelona with the Hundred Projects in collaboration with the Barcelona mayor (as well as in a number of Italian cities), is to start with the small issues which can be dealt with immediately by whatever professional team is to hand. When enough of these have been completed you put them together as a strategic plan for a zone of the city and do the same elsewhere. By the time someone has produced the big master-plan it has, if you have been following Mackay, already been implemented. He is comfortable with the fact that he may have little control over the architecture -- the really important thing is that something gets done.

At the back we searched the attendance lists to see if someone from the new London mayor's office might have heard this. Ominously, no one had come.

SUTHERLAND LYALL

Nicholas Grimshaw kicked off the afternoon's proceedings. Before presenting his office's latest projects he cast an eye back over some of his work from the late 1980s, showing how he had attempted to weave new ideas into 'the tapestry of the cities': the Sainsbury's complex at Camden Town was a demonstration of the 'warmth and interest' that an architect can generate. An architect's perspective of 10 or 15 years is an unusual one and it gave Grimshaw a magnificent opportunity to demonstrate a canon of principles which on the one hand is almost Puginian yet on the other is engaged with the challenge of the diminishing resources of the planet.

David Chipperfield has worked in some of the most sensitive sites in the built world; he suggested that the fashionable polemic of the free market city, which is about movement and change, can become a fig leaf for architects' own submission to market forces. The direction a city goes in is by no means clear, and the way in which decisions are taken neither predictable nor efficient. In recent American projects, he has sought to re-establish historic centres through public schemes, essentially a reinvention of the modern downtown through an intriguing investigation of scale and association.

John McAslan is doing remarkable things with inherited space, coping with old fabric in a robust way and yet with respect, at the Peter Jones department store in London, within the confines not only of Crabtree's 1930s facade but also those of a number of highly irregular neighbours; a commission which owes something perhaps to the success of his practice's successful refurbishment of Mendelsohn and Chermayeff's Bexhill Pavilion. Other recent projects included the complex reworking of part of the Greenwich Hospital for Trinity College, as well as the vast new-build project for the MaxMara cosmetics company in Bologna.

Peter Davey introduced Gert Wingardh by saying that more than any other Swedish architect, he is already reclaiming for Sweden its 'wonderful' preeminence of the early 1950s. Wingardh began by presenting two schemes in Gothenburg, demonstrating his 'eco-urbanism' expressed through a witty, expressive, simplistic structure, with natural ventilation and negligible energy consumption, vast windows and generous canopies. He also related how his somewhat ironic scheme for Sergel Square in Stockholm so caught the public imagination that he was asked to compete in the second round in spite of not having been an official competitor in the first place.

Louisa Hutton prefaced her presentation of Sauerbruch & Hutton's GSW building in Berlin with a thoughtful and critical historical survey of the development of the city, particularly along the site of the Wall, which had led her to retain the existing late 1950s tower on the site, both to commemorate the Cold War and to signify the changes that have come through the end of East Germany. The ecological lessons learnt on this project are being elaborated at the partnership's new Federal Ministry of the Environment at Dessau.

Finally, landscape architect Adriaan Geuze presented Moscow as 'the European City'; his version of Red Square encompasses references to technology, celebrity, society and context, a highly enjoyable and unpredictable tilt at the themes of the conference.