5 and 6 December 2024 – Auditorium of the Loyola Faculty – 35 rue de Sèvres, Paris

Open to all – no reservation required

In Memoriam Jean-Louis Cohen

On 18 September 1924, together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier opened his studio at 35 rue de Sèvres, which enabled him to develop new ways of conducting his career as an architect. While the studio may at first glance resemble a traditional architectural practice, it soon became much more than that, resembling a kind of start-up orincubator, a place for experimenting with new projects and for theoretical conceptualisation.

Structurally, organisationally and conceptually, it prefigures less the model of the world’s very large agencies (with their hundreds of architects and designers) than that of a ‘human-scale’ structure working to reconcile practice and theory in the project process. From this point of view, the choice of collaborators is essential. The condition of the work fully justifies the international opening to many nationalities, making each trainee or collaborator a privileged interlocutor to contribute, from his or her ‘cultural’ point of view, to the improvement of the material and conceptual systems chosen.

Le Corbusier’s choice of cosmopolitan agency gave him the ability to conceive of modernity as a multi-dimensional global project with its own Kantian-inspired expectations of peace and universal prosperity.

The Rencontres will seek to understand the particularities of this place, to evoke its functioning, but will also question the role played by Le Corbusier in the development and organisation of this workshop, without forgetting his recruitment, the management of projects… They will give an account of the Corbusian vision of the workshop as a microcosm and reappropriation of the real world. Particular attention will be paid to the permanent reversibility of the agency between architectural studio and laboratory of ideas, as evidenced by its reorganisation on its return to Paris under German occupation (formation of ASCORAL within it) and its efficient deployment after the Second World War to meet the challenges posed by the new major projects.

The studio at 35 rue de Sèvres will be the focus of a study that will take us from inside to outside, from inside to outside.