Kenley, Stefania

Revistes CientÃ­fiques de la Universitat de Barcelona

Loitering Parisian Journey

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

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A regular Parisian journey seems to be perfect; so, why loiter ?
Loitering is a designed waste of time during travelling, a deliberate
slowing down movement, which may also be seen as an intentional
error, or indolence.  Yet, a site perceived at a slow pace may allow an
alternative subject perception. That  is neither at eye level (as in a regu-
lar promenade), nor a bird’s eye view. It is linked neither to the architect’s
nor to the planner’s representation, but related to the experience of a
potential  wanderer.  It has a possible reference to the French word
“flanêrie “ or to the notion of “dérive” understood as  “a technique of
transient passage through varied ambiences.” .  Yet, the loitering
described here does not necessarily mean drifting, but a slow process
of revealing through visual means and historical facts an urban detail
that although isolated, can trigger changes in a much larger area than
its own surroundings.
While loitering between the river Seine and the undeveloped
land occupied by the railway  tracks arriving to the Austerlitz Main
Line Station, I was intrigued by one particular situation occurred in
this vast space  attracting a large public and political attention.  The
site has been the subject of a 15 year-long project, financed and
supported by the City of Paris, the French Government, the Parisian
Region, the National Railway Company - SNCF, etc. This project is
managed by SEMAPA  - the company set up for planning, co-
ordinating and constructing the entire operation
In 1980, in Masséna - one of the three quarters of the zone
under the jurisdiction of ZAC Paris Rive Gauche, the SNCF company
started renting space in its cold storage plant that had been left in
abandonment since 1965.  This building known as “Les Frigos” (the
refrigerators), had been built by the railway company Paris - Orleans,
between 1919 and 1921 for storing at a temperature between - 18C
and - 22C certain foods like fruits, meat, fish, cheese, etc.   After
becoming disused, a space of about 9000m2 had been gradually rented
to individual artists who subsequently formed the association “91 Quai
de la Gare”.
The issue that I bring for discussion in the conference Waterfront
of Art  is not the various artistic production of this Association, but the
artists’ presence in this disused building left on site.  As a result of this
occupancy, the building not only survived the demolition authorised
in the first plan of development in the early ’90s, but proved to have
had some unexpected consequences  on the future development of
the zone.
In this sense, the building’s conversion and inhabitation process,
cannot be dissociated from the transformation programme of Paris
Rive Gauche; there, the “Frigos” building played a significant role, not
only as place for creation and communication but also as an  alternative
aesthetic generator on site.  Through the present paper, I suggest that
Loitering Parisian
Journey
Stefania Kenley
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sometimes artistic and cultural evidence can be more relevant for an
understanding of complex urban change, than a traditional  site analysis.
This premise can be questioned at the level of both image and
reactions provoked; in other words, if this transformed cold storage
plant had until now an impact on the development of the site, it is not
only because of its aspect - no matter how intriguing it might appear
to us today - but also due to the 15 years debate created around it.
In order to unravel this process, I proceed with an inside out
loitering on an imaginary spiral having the centre inside the “Frigos”
building and unwinding  towards the visible edge of the quarter.  Thus,
loitering on the inner surface, through the walls, across industrial
chambers, around the building, and finally around the quarter, might
lead us slowly from a marginal detail into the heartbeat of Paris.
…on the inner surface
The space was rented  as it was at the time of its total abandonment:
without any partitioning, windows (except at the 6th floor), without
connections either to the water and electricity supply or to the sewage
system.  Since the beginning of the conversion, random layers of graffiti
have been covering all walls inside the first four floors.  Once arrived
in the partly obscure space inside the building, one is surrounded by a
continuous interlacing of coloured graffiti shapes, running vertically,
curving on piping, twisting on the technical equipment, turning around
the spiral staircase … finally, the building itself might be taken for an
art object.
This ‘tensed-up’ surface had maybe an accidental influence on
the intuitive way new buildings were engaging a dialogue between
flatness and illusory depth.  In the Tolbiac quarter, also part of the
ZAC Paris Rive Gauche, in some areas facing the river Seine and the
BNF (The French National Library), the public housing proposals had
been granted with a privileged regime of facade treatment .   Two
hundred metres away from the cold-storage plant, a block developed
on the East Side of the National Library, proposed a façade planned to
fully expose repetitive details of Baroque paintings engraved on the
acid treated glass .  This experimental glass panels proposing a direct
engagement of a culturally loaded surface with the street level was
tested and accomplished in the workshops of Saint Gobain glass
manufacturers.
The example of  subtle degrees of transparency is of course,  at
the opposite end from the thick walls covered by graffiti, causing
gloomy and rather uncanny feelings.  Yet, there is a level of engaging
with representational issues in an abstract built environment, where
surface tension achieved through image distortion becomes part of a
post-modern discourse.
…through the walls
The thick sandwich walls covered by graffiti, are made of layers of
concrete, brick and cork separated by air, forming the right mixture
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for the necessary performance of the cold storage plant.  The conversion
to artists studios, implied cutting windows in these walls.  The erratic
renting process and the threat of demolition did not create conditions
for any overall aesthetic considerations.  As a consequence, the walls
were pierced in order to form windows where and when each studio
area required it for its own use.  Having exclusively functional
motivations, all the new openings  form a fairly random pattern of the
façade.
The image of the transformed plant appears to be created
according to the internal use of the building and not in relation to the
outside world. Yet, there are several instances where the artists seemed
to have been aware of the impact of this building on site.  Their decision
to ignore the façade and to be exclusively concerned with their studios’
performance,  was in fact expressing a contemporary way of operating
in disused industrial buildings.
This randomly pierced façade has established a formal precedent
and provoked a sort of formal trigger for the new buildings proposed
for this area.  In the north-eastern vicinity of the “Frigos”, the
development of mixed housing and artists studios - now under
construction, is playing in the façade the random game of solid and
void.  In the new building, the ratio of windows to the wall surface is
obviously larger and the random position of windows represents the
architect’s choice and not an internal distribution necessity.
In the ‘Frigos’, the artists were cutting only the minimum
number of windows needed for their studios.  Although what seems
to have mattered at the time was solely the good exploitation of the
existing structural qualities of the building, an unconscious desire might
have appealed to some - an expressed anxiety provoked by a series of
random building works and intentional ‘poor-design’ appearance, that
has urged the public eye to engage with the unprivileged condition of
claimed studios space.
…across industrial chambers
The space was rented by the SNCF, as it was found at the time of its
total abandonment;  therefore, the efforts of the association were already
considerable.  The interest in good performance responding to the
specific requirements of individual artists have revealed a surprising
potential of simultaneous activities across the building.  At the
beginning of 1997, this capacity was underlined in the report of the
inquiry commission for the ZAC, that anticipated the building’s
survival.
“ Although the big cold storage plant is of a questionable value,
it has  exceptional structural and functional qualities.  With slabs that
can support 7 tones on the square meter, its thick sandwich walls and
impressive doors, this building can receive side by side a locomotive, a
jazz orchestra of 40 musicians and a ultramodern recording studio
requiring the total absence of noise and vibrations.
In this respect, we can compare it with the purpose built artists’
studios located also in ZAC, conceived in a pure and transparent
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crystalline parallelepiped placed on his site, but where no artist or
craftsman can find the structural qualities specific to his or her activity”
This comparison underlines the misleading association of the
modernist image of continuous window and open plan with the
physical requirements of artistic production.  The success of the ‘Frigos’
is probably explained precisely through the literal interpretation of
the modernist slogan “form follows function” and arriving quite far
form the formal language proposed by L’Esprit Nouveau periodical in
the early 20’s.  The aesthetic statement made by the building is more
than an ‘honest’ façade expression of internal action whatever that
might be, instead, it is expressing and living in honest creative
conditions beyond any aesthetic evaluation.
… around the building
Sometimes ephemeral gestures bring to light fears and darker sides of
rather uneasy  conditions of inhabitation.  On the main façade of the
‘Frigos’, above the front entrance and on the thin ledge separating the
ground floor from the first floor, a dog in a watching position is painted
at a rather monumental scale.  Beyond the rather humorous side of
this manifestation of popular art, one can register residents’
vulnerability due to the relative lack of safety on site .
This seems to be a common denominator of any zone formed
by disused industrial estates after the second world war.  The functional
association of railway, warehouses, storage, manufacturing plants,
compressed air generators left in dereliction in post-war metropolitan
ellipses often creates a rather sinister environment.  On the fence of
the next building site,  five hundred  metres further away from the
‘Frigos’, commemorative inscriptions were fixed by the General
Confederation of the Deported and Victims of Oppression and Racism,
acknowledging the existence on that site of a concentration camp
during the second World War.
This inscription refers to site situated  between the Mills of Paris
- planned to be converted for the University  Paris 7, and the main
building of the SUDAC Plant  where the installations of compressed
air have been already dismantled.  This could have been be a political
move, but it might well represent a genuine sign of an unsettled past.
A development plan erasing all remains and memories of historical
sweat and misfortune would have removed life itself and created instead
a septic but rather dead environment.
… around the quarter
The new  plan of development - the PAZ  approved in 1997, for the
zone called Paris Rive Gauche cancelled all previous decisions that
approved the demolition of the existing industrial buildings including
the ‘Frigos’.  By the decision taken in the latest development plan, the
industrial buildings are to be converted and incorporated in the new
plan of the Massena quarter.
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The situation has been reversed during the last four years and
what was considered embarrassing industrial remains is now preserved
and protected as part of the Parisian heritage and becoming strong
centres of interest for Massena.  Their random positions on site can
give a spatial  scope and orientation to the proposed master plan and
suggest a pace of fragmentation for the abstract pattern of the open-
block system proposed by in the Master Plan.  Yet, the precise way
this place will finally relate to the space around the ‘Frigos’ building, is
still under question, and the manner in which the urban continuity
and programmatic coexistence are going to open choices and respond
to a swarm of voices, is still to be found.
For the moment we only know that, unlike most of
contemporary cities, the new plan is going to spread over blank zones
reiterating the old street pattern and extending it smoothly over an
urban void.  This way it can create a grid that through a variable pace
and open block sequence,  is different from the traditional gridiron.
The block size doesn’t follow the scale of the industrial site but
that of the existing city.  The ‘open’ condition would apply only to the
block size, without being extrapolated under the generic name of open
plan, to the quarter size. This way it can avoid the error of closed urban
systems usually limiting “urban choices by enforcing movement into
strict hierarchical spines or roots”  Despite its apparent ordering system,
the Massena quarter, as well as the entire Master Plan for Paris Rive
Gauche, promises to allow a multiplicity of circuits along or across its
grid, allowing errand lingering, play of chance, or loitering, as well as
purposeful trajectories.
… conclusion
In the end, this paradox would be better described by the end of a
manuscript called The Contemporary Irrationalism: the Arts and Dada
and oddly enough sent by the author to L”Esprit  Nouveau, at the
time when the editor was no longer Paul Dermée, but Le Corbusier.
“Applying a principle to an unsuitable thing, means escaping that
principle.  At the outbreak of the war, I’ve seen a town constable taking
to the Police Station a ten year-old child who took a picture of the
Eiffel Tower.  Why Dada makes us inevitably think of this constable.?”
Applying the principles of Modern Movement to an industrial
wreck meant overthrowing those principle.  Consequently, preserving
the converted ‘Frigos’ on a site proposed for a major Development
Plan, meant going over erasures of historical traces.
Admitted or not, for the shift of attitude from the tabula rasa, to a
post-modern acceptance of a complex urban condition, we can ‘blame’
among others, the artists and their active use of the disused ‘Frigos’
building.
Some roots of this shift can be traced back in the Parisian culture
of “flanerie”, avant-garde events and performances.  The first Dada
journey of the 14th April 1921 taking place in front of the church Saint-
Julien-le-Pauvre, was “investigating new interpretations of nature,
related more to urban life than specifically to art” .  After the improvised
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discourses of Breton and Tzara under a torrential rain that happened
to fall that day, the most intriguing guided tour took place around the
church St Julien.  In front of different features and artworks, instead
of providing historical explanations Raymond Duncan was loitering
with a big dictionary and opening it randomly, he was reading different
entries coming to hand as explanations for the historical remains. In
that context, loitering was no longer a verb, but a new representation
of old situations during a lapsed Parisian journey.
At the beginning of this paper I suggested that urban change
can be sometimes anticipated or even provoked by a particular  artistic
or cultural evidence .  As we have seen until now, this premise might
have been true, but it was definitely not used as an objective analytical
tool. As the subconscious was exploited by surrealists without ever
pretending of bringing any “true” evidence,  the slow collective
conversion of the “Frigos” was a rational, yet random process, engaging
political moves only by accident,  without any initial intent.
Loitering used here as representation technique of temporal
dimensions has been unwinding a series of historical links between
urban form and its surrounding space.  Proposed as a spiral, it refers
to the dialectic engaged between the building conversion and use of
the “Frigos” as it is found today, and the residuum space  that is going
to be articulated and possible integrated in the interstitial “open” space
of the Massena Quarter. The possible result can be imagined in several
ways:
· one would be a docile image, where the “Frigos’ would become
a ‘museum’ piece, or a tourist attraction in a landscaped garden;
· an opposite one may be an isolated space “designed” to preser-
ve the image of dereliction.
Beyond their positive and negative appearance, both scenarios seem
to be faces of the same coin - a well known commodity likely to be
produced by a design practitioner. They may represent “an explosion
of beige” in the Generic City “built at incredible speed, and conceived
at even more incredible pace” or the results of a “Strip Beautification
Committee”, where “ total Design comes to mean ‘total control”.
However, both options are very far from the daily critical input engaged
in the inhabitation process of the “Frigos”.
In the near future, fragile as life itself, the original contest of the
“Frigos”’ inhabitants may find different reasons of resistance and take
different forms of critique; but while changing, it might just manage
to stay away from two lethal options: gentrification and dereliction!


Loitering Parisian Journey

Abstract

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Revistes CientÃfiques de la Universitat de Barcelona

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Directory of Open Access Journals

Loitering Parisian Journey

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Revistes CientÃ­fiques de la Universitat de Barcelona

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Directory of Open Access Journals

Revistes CientÃfiques de la Universitat de Barcelona