Aujourd'hui: Art et Architecture no. 50, July, Paris

An element from Ron Herron’s 1964 Walking City lumbers onto the cover of Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture’s July issue, meeting an elephant out for a stroll in front of Casson, Neville, and Partner’s Elephant and Rhinoceros Pavilion at the London Zoo. Aujourd’hui was started by André Bloc in 1955 to explore the links between the fields of art and architecture that fell outside the scope of his main periodical l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. The issue confirms Archigram’s leap from their own pages to the covers of established periodicals (see also issue no. 63 of Design Quarterly in this same year). The earliest extensive publication of Archigram’s work in France, projects by Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb occupy more than twice the number of pages given to any other architect in the issue. Guest editors Patrice Goulet and Claude Parent’s enthusiasm for British architectural culture, and more particularly for what they identified as its “technical” and “expressionist” tendencies, also reveals significant omissions (the complete absence, for instance, of Alison and Peter Smithson). In their survey of developments across the channel Goulet and Parent play the younger “architects of opposition” (Archigram and Cedric Price) against the work of an older, more established generation (Sir Hugh Casson, Denys Lasdun, Leslie Martin). Goulet and Parent were fascinated with what they termed the “appearance of a protective carapace” amongst the projects they reviewed, a phenomenon that linked the seemingly antithetical “technicité” of the younger generation with their teachers’ concern for “formal expression.” In this sense, the generational showdown suggested by the montage on the cover of Aujourd’hui may also be read as Parent and Goulet’s attempt at comparative physiognomy. CB

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