The experience of architectural modernity has not only been marked by success, as the myth of irresistible progress in form and technique would have it. The expectations generated by the industrial age - to which some remarkable experiments have responded - have often been disappointed, and the attempts of the early moderns disfigured by the transition to mass production by public operators or the private sector. The promise of a better life
announced by garden cities, housing estates and urban renewal, and symbolized by new aesthetics, was only fulfilled for a short time, before social difficulties transformed the reality and meaning of productions that were out of step with the rhetoric and theoretical projects from which they sprang. Echoing the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale, the symposium will analyze the condition of architecture in modern France from a European perspective, combining the views of historians, architects, social scientists and public figures. Theoretical positions and relations with intellectuals and politicians will be considered from a research point of view, while practitioners will testify to the resonance that the most memorable projects and buildings arouse today.
The symposium will be filmed and subsequently broadcast on the Collège de France website.
