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Research on Beauty | Roger Anger's Response to High-rise Housing Trends in Post-war Paris

Datum
Time
Organisational Units
Academy
Location Description
211a
Location Venue (1)
Main Building
Location Address (1)
Schillerplatz 3
Location ZIP and/or City (1)
1010 Vienna

Lecture by Anupama Kundoo, within the frame of the lecture series "Built and Un-built Utopias - The Politics of Conversions" organized by the Institute for Art and Architecture in winter term 2010/11.

Roger Anger was one of the most prolific French architects of the 50s and 60s. Sculptural plasticity and individualized timeless modernity identify his unique architectural language. This is amply demonstrated by the more than 100 buildings designed by his office in Paris alone. His three 28 storey housing towers in Grenoble, the highest residential buildings in Europe at the time and recipient of the Belgian Premier Prix International d'Architecture in 1967 remain today as an icon of the city and a spectacular example of his work. Roger Anger was appointed Chief Architect of Auroville, a utopian city in South India calling for visionary planning, the site where in the last decades the essence of his work as an architect, painter and sculptor was concentrated.

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The architecture of his early housing projects in Paris demonstrates a reaction against what he called the 'dictatorship of the curtain wall' and an overemphasis on functionalism and standardization that marked the architecture of that time. Questioning the over-simplification of modernist principles, his office devised strategies to counter the monotony and loss of human scale in the built environment.

ANUPAMA KUNDOO began her own architecture practice in 1990 soon after graduation from Bombay University. With a strong focus on material research and sustainable architecture her innovative approach is supported by intensive research and experimentation from the development of building technologies to building prototypes that are environmentally sound and socio-economically beneficial. Her PhD completed at the University of Technology in Berlin focused on 'Building with Fire: Baked-insitu Mud Houses of India, Evolution and Analysis of Ray Meeker's experiments'.

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Kundoo's projects as well as writings have been featured in a wide range of international journals and newspapers such as Phaidon World Atlas of Contemporary Architecture and AD. She has edited a sustainable building design manual and has recently authored a book 'Roger Anger: Research on Beauty', about the life and work of a prominent Parisian architect (1923-2008) of the fifties and sixties, who was appointed the Chief Architect of Auroville.
She has just been appointed by Parsons New School of Design, New York for teaching 'Environmental Technology and Material Sciences' and is currently working on her next publication, Fired Houses, about the pioneering work of Californian ceramist Ray Meeker.

Built and Un-built Utopias - The Politics of Conversions

Modernism has produced some of the largest single buildings of our times.

Today architects continue to speak of their achievements in terms of size and square meters. City developments are measured in hectares and acres, when concerning emerging economies even in square kilometres.

Le Corbusier's allegorical ocean liner became the normative and even litteral reference in many debates on the city and its architecture. Megastructures, as autonomous systems of dense living, working and existence became the basis of many architectural theses. The metabolists, the archigram group, the situationists and many other thinkers/architects such as Rossi and perhaps to the present time Koolhaas have described through various models the potential of projecting in cities.

The lecture series Built and Un-built Utopias will explore the Modernist belief in architecture's capacity to absorb the city scale. It will do so by presenting various speakers who are addressing the issue from different foci. Architects re-formulating Modernism's legacy, filmmakers documenting its failure and success, academics re-thinking city scale architecture, landscape architects re-generating abandoned and dilapidated infrastructures.

The Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture will throughout the 2010-11 academic year debate and suggest new ideas in order torevisit the cultural heritage of modernism, its Built and Un-built Utopias.