La Roche-Guyon the new Capital of France in 1960s

Susano

Banned
100km north-west? Why would they remove the capital even further from the geographical centre of France? Of course totally in the middle is rural nothingness, but Orleans seems nicely located...

However, personally Im of course all for huge urban centres. France (and the UK, too) of course could use some adminstrative decentralisation - not federalism, but at least dispersing institutions around the country. I must tell you (collective you, meaning all French and Brits), your obsession with Paris and London, respectively, is unhealthy! :p
 
Not that absolutely everything is bad in modern urbanism, but you should see the horrors it has visited on post-war France.

Hey, it could get interesting, too - witness some of its effect on Montréal:

800px-Habitat_panorama.jpg
 
Hey, it could get interesting, too - witness some of its effect on Montréal:

Yeah, Habitat is cool. Admittedly, it's one of those things that needs to be a oneoff, or the dominant theme for the entire town, but as a oneoff - or a weird cyberpunk vertical city - it's cool.
 
Very similar in fact, so much that I wonder why anybdoy would want to live there!

Oh, nobody does, it's on an island in the middle of nowhere and supposedly the thing acts like a wind tunnel. :D But it still has eg utilities. (It was originally the housing for the athletes at the '76 Olympics.)
 
Well, put it this way - the architect of Habitat '67 was of the same school as this:

Are you sure? Habitat doesn't look like anything Niemeyer has projected...

And yes, I agree with Guilherme, Niemeyer surely doesn't deserve all the praise he gets...
 
Not that absolutely everything is bad in modern urbanism, but you should see the horrors it has visited on post-war France.


One of the (in)famous Niemeyer's works in France is in Le Havre (probably the ugliest french city) a city almost completely rebuilt after WWII. It must be said that it's not all Nimeyer's fault, Perret is the main guilty. Imagine a La Roche-Gouyon similar to a large sized Le Havre :

le_havre.jpg




6532_102807573602_71694348602_2037658_2977908_n.jpg
 
Are you sure? Habitat doesn't look like anything Niemeyer has projected...

Well, I could say that Moshe Safdie (the guy who designed Habitat '67) and Niemeyer were basically of the same modernist school - just that Safdie interpreted it differently (since, after all, we're talking about Expo '67, where seeing how things would be in the future is a big topic).
 

Hendryk

Banned
Imagine a La Roche-Gouyon similar to a large sized Le Havre :
I was indeed thinking of Le Havre. As well as the soulless housing projects that sprouted on the peripheries of big cities in the 1950s and 1960s.

Note that when Jacobs depicted the future La Roche-Guyon in a brief 21st-century flashback, he did have it look brutally utilitarian.
 
Interesting idea, but seems unlikely for several reasons...

1. The cost...the French are already in the middle of a costly war in Algeria+decolonization;
QUOTE]

No. Actually, the creation of what we call the "New Cities" (five great urban centers around Paris) has been decided, implemeted, and funded from 1961 to 1966. The Algerian War has not been any obstacle to that because the programm has begun after the war.

But I agree with you, a new capital is unlikely. We actually had a Brasilia of some sort, that we call Versailles, and the experience was not that conclusive. Paris as our capital city is far too rooted in French collective Psyche to lose its status for technocratic reasons. The least of the "cons" against such a plan wouldn't be the fact that historically, setting a Government outside Paris rings an alarm bell (usually, it means that Fritz or Reginald feels like invading us again.).

Actually, there would be very few cities of places apart Paris that could candidate for a capital status, given their localisation : Probably Orleans, maybe Rouen (which would have become a London in reverse, with the Seine playing the role of the Thames), and that's all. All the other major cities are too close to the borders and you can't have any decent capital in the Massif Central because of the cost of transport infrastructures. La Roche-Guyon would only have delayed the overconcentration of powers in Paris : it is now a suburb of the capital.

As for the architecture, you are all right here : it would have probably looked similar to Le Havre (although Le Havre, while not being my favorite destination for a honeymoon, is a surprisingly intersting city from an architectural POW, as well as a city-planning performance. I think it is now in the Unesco world Heritage list). This is what I personnaly call "Communogaullist" style : the grace and beauty of Soviet constructions mixed with the obsessive planification of the 60's style Gaullism.

As a conclusion, I also immediately made a connection with Blake and Mortimer. Did anyone here had nightmares as I did after reading the part with "La Chose" ?
 
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