INTERSTICES02.indb 21 The artist, architect and town planner, Luc Deleu, worked for more than ten years on the project, The Unadapted City,2 a speculative urban-scale project articulated as a succession of spatial models. As each of these encloses the preceding ones, Vipcity, its last occurrence, represents the entire project. The Unadapted City has been shown in numerous exhibitions and described in three monographs.3 If the impressive numbers of accompanying tables, diagrams, drawings and models testify to the enterprise’s scale and complexity, this documentation doesn’t fully succeed in revealing the project’s nature or goals. Though the author himself provides for its chronicle through an abundance of explanatory notes, an im- pression remains that he is showing the pieces of a giant jigsaw devoid of an outline. In fact, Deleu has become famous through his peculiar manner of showing things. His practice of what he termed “resistance architecture” (Davidts, 1999: middle verso of fold page 10) soon attracted the attention of the contemporary art world.4 The piles of containers, the tumbled-down pylons and cranes, the mani- festos and controversial proposals, and even his urban conversion projects, all had the capacity to involve the viewer.5 His work did not seem to ask for analysis as much as it did for an audience, and often derived its meaning from the pleas- ure and effect of a gesture.6 An earlier version of ticle was published as Car pour fi nir tout retourne à la mer – Vipcity ou la mise en scène d’une fi liation (Châtel 2004), which was trans- lated from the French by Michael Novy in February 2006. 2 Luc Deleu b.1944, founder of TOP offi ce (“Turn On Planning”), Antwerp. 3 Deleu (1996); Theys (2001); Deleu (2002). 4 In this interview Deleu ex- plains that he wants to resist the generally accepted notion that every practice of architecture must be instrumental and fi nally aimed at building. He states that the current separation between art and architecture is inoppor- tune and reductive; that there is no reason why a work of archi- tecture could not be an image or a discourse. 5 For an overall view of the work prior to The Unadapted City, see Deleu (1991). 6 See Bekaert (1991). Plan Obus and Vipcity, as from Father to Son Guy Châtel Installation with two high-ten- sion pylons lying down for Ini- tiatief 86, Ghent, 1986 Photo : Dominique Stroobant ORBINO, Nauerna, 2002 Photo Luc Deleu INTERSTICES 07 The Unadapted City started with such a gesture. The work was launched in 1995, following Wien Usiebenpole, the project for a linear city of 120,000 inhabitants on the Donau Insel.7 On this occasion Deleu used the score of Strauss’s Blue Danube to regulate the city’s functional arrangement. Through the arbitrariness of this procedure, he drew attention to architecture’s lack of instruments for the con- ception and regulation of urban facilities. The Unadapted City, in turn, aimed at studying and developing models for the deployment of such facilities which, for Deleu, are an essential element of habitat. Beyond their contribution to comfort and their organizational aptitude, he acknowledges their capacity to become part of our heritage in future years. Noting that the public space is under pressure from private interests, he intends to induce decision-makers to face their responsibilities by confronting them with his project’s ‘ethical stand’. Through his work with urban facilities, or equipment, he proposes to advance a renewal of Western societies’ urban habitats. In initiating new strategies, Deleu seems to hope that the project will provide examples that may contribute to a critique of the aims of architecture and urbanism.8 Deleu sets his ambition against the current aims of a discipline he considers to be too pragmatic and therefore impotent. He asserts that The Unadapted City is a work of ‘conceptual urbanism’, an autonomous theoretical venture.9 Seen in this light however, it reveals some fragility. The postulates that supposedly underlie it are nowhere verifi ed. The work cannot be said to grow out of its premises; it forges ahead regardless. Undeniably speculative in character, its desire to be ex- emplary predisposes it towards representation, and a performance that is elabo- rated through an abundance of references to Modernism and the oeuvre of Le Corbusier. While the project derives much of its meaning from this posture of a descendant, the work simultaneously bounces off its cross-references, continually gets carried way by its marginalia. Representation is constructed in the course of its enunciation, and hence the work is much more a discursive than a theoretical undertaking. Rather than furnish the project with arguments that its author prefers to dispense with, I shall attempt to make sense of its cunning genealogical claims. These claims do not occur in properly referenced arguments but in the course of enunciation. For instance, the two most recent monographs about The Unadapted City, which were produced under Deleu’s own control and can therefore be regarded as part of its documentary fund, contain a large number of photographs of Le Corbusier’s work – without explanation. This essay is an attempt to discover what they hint at, by re-ordering the pieces of the jigsaw Deleu presents us with. 7 For an account of this project, see Châtel (2001a: 43-47). 8 For all those claims, see Deleu (2002: 25). 9 See Châtel & Davidts (2003). Wien Usiebenpole, model, 1994- 1995 Photo : SYB’L S.pictures Wien Usiebenpole, eigenmächtig- es Funktionsarrangement, 1994-96, digital drawing 23 The Unadapted City proceeds in stages. It begins with ten panels that make up an atlas of urban facilities.10 Each corresponds to a category of services and is a graphic transposition of quantitative data derived from the analysis of existing urban equipment. Their surface area grows, seemingly in response to population growth. But this is about a different form of exploration from reading. The large polychrome panels are nothing like the dry verbiage one would expect from such documents. Here, already, the image reigns supreme and the ‘taxography’ tends towards the iconic. The panel listing medical services brings to mind the play of light across the pale green walls of a hospital, while that listing culture and leisure activities evokes a criss-cross pattern of light beams. The atlas relates the equipment programme to the number of inhabitants. An- other document, the DOS standard,11graphically represents the proportional rela- tion between the surface needed for this equipment programme and the housing area. Here, the equipment is presented in three columns according to its desired distribution. Deleu differentiates between structural, zoned and occasional al- locations, depending on the impact that a type of service may have on the struc- ture of its environment. The DOS standard is not only the end-product of data processing, it also constitutes an articulated and quantifi ed programme of urban habitat - its generator. 10 The ten panels form a set shown for the fi rst time in May 1996 at the Netherlands Archi- tecture Institute (NAI) in Rot- terdam. These documents were published in Deleu (1996). Since then, several of the panels have been revised. 11 DOS is the acronym for De Onaangepaste Stad, the Dutch name of The Unadapted City. Luc Deleu & T.O.P. offi ce, DOS ‘95 (La Ville Inadaptée) - Planche VIII - Culture & Divertisse- ment, 1999, dessin digitalisé, © SABAM INTERSTICES 07 Bingbong (1996) should be regarded as a fi rst draft of the spatial model of The Unad- apted City – more an illustration, however, than a test of the generator. The urbanis- tic conception of this district for 6,800 inhabitants is based on Usiebenpole. Through the radical application of precepts such as the dictatorship of the sun, the segrega- tion of traffi c and the liberation of soil, the latter project was in full conformity with the town planning ideology of the 1930’s. The entire habitat of the Linear City was installed in a sequence of 110 Unités d’Habitation,12 with entwined infrastruc- ture on several levels serving the Inner Streets. Bingbong offers a variant of this, but remains a simple mechanism for the occupation of space. Instead of repeating the 12 Le Corbusier, Housing unit of compatible size. Deleu uses the Unité of Marseilles, 1946-1952. 13 These are averages calculat- ed from data relating to a large number of existing districts and towns. Also featured are calcu- lations aimed at estimating the population of their hinterland. Top left: Junction Haarlem-Am- sterdam ‘Halfweg’, a surface ar- rangement for a building devel- opment for 60.000 inhabitants, 1995 Top right: Housing Generator 2000, A surface arangement for a building development for 20.000 people/SA standard, 1997 Right: BING BONG, 1996 D.O.S. ‘95 (The Unadapted City). Photo: Steven Van den Bergh 25 architecture of the Unité, Deleu applies the term literally; the running metre of the Unité is put forward as a yardstick, one metre corresponding to the housing of 6.4 persons. The habitat is organized in buildings of various shapes, designed as extrusions from the Unité’s cross-profi le. Subsequent development of the spatial model will be based on a gradual ap- proach to urban complexity, where several thresholds are marked in response to rising population. The base level is the number of persons that the Unité de Marseille could reasonably house today, i.e. an average of 2.51 inhabitants for each of its 350 apartments, or a total of 878 persons. The second level is represented by the Unité’s original population, i.e.1,600 persons. The next levels are the district, the local town and the regional city, for which DOS envisages respectively 9,500, 22,000 and 72,000 inhabitants.13 The highest level, threshold for a truly urban situation, would be reached with a population of 192,000. Brikabrak (1998) and Dinkytown (1998-99) are projects for districts of 9,500 inhabit- ants, based entirely on the Bingbong system. Brikabrak is the primitive model of Dinkytown, and both have a full place in Octopus (1999). The latter proposes a sys- tem of four crossing infrastructure lines, marking out the centre of a city whose linear districts could extend in eight different directions. But it does not extend beyond this knot where the Brikabrak and Dinkytown districts join, forming a lo- cal-sized town of 38,000.14 The numerical growth is obtained by doubling the population each time, ear- lier projects being incorporated into the new. Thus Octopus, in its turn, was destined to form an integral part of Vipcity (1999), which generates the in- frastructure of an enormous housing development, whose 15,140 lots al- low the population to be doubled again.15 This brings the project up to the level of a regional city. The additional equipment necessitated by the popula- tion growth is installed alongside a monorail track, which connects with the Octopus centre. 14 The fi gure of Octopus is like the fi gure [#] – octopus or eight limbs. On two of its branches Brikabrak and Dinkytown are fi xed. The population is 9500 + 9500 (for Brikabrak and Dinky- town) + 19000 on the knot fi g- ure itself (#): total 38000. 15 Each lot has 0.663 hectare, so that 0.663 hectare = 2.51 x 0.2643 ha. On the basis of an ‘orbanistic’ calculation, Deleu presents 0.2643 ha as the aver- age land area available for indi- vidual housing. Thus the 0.663 ha lots represent the ‘maximum luxury’ that a family could have access to today. By drawing the boundaries in such a way as to suggest later division of the land, Deleu anticipates the cal- culations being very soon over- taken by the vertiginous growth in world population; he refers to the housing lot ironically as “decent”. The concept of maxi- mum luxury is the justifi cation for the name Vipcity. Population redoubled results in (15,140 x 2.51) + 38.000 (original popula- tion of Octopus) = 76.000 in- habitants for Vipcity. D.O.S. XXI - VIPCITY # 9 updated D.O.S. XXI - Model Octopus, model t(scale 1:2000), 1999, 6 x 301 x 80 cm Photo : Steven van den Bergh INTERSTICES 07 The avowed aim of the systematic exploration carried out through successive spa- tial models, is none other than the gradual discovery of the capacity of functional arrangements to organize and modulate urban space. Yet The Unadapted City has the special feature of grasping the whole articulation of a project by its extremi- ties, by its knowledge base or, more precisely, its statistical substructure; and by its outcome, that is to say, its morphology and shape. Both ends are determined in enunciation, fi xed in accordance with a logic specifi c to them. The fi rst is the product of detailed study; the second is placed there, like a courtroom exhibit hastily assembled from the debris of architecture’s history. The project can thus be seen as a double systematic procedure, which follows two lines of action entirely controlled by deduction; two lines that the author then endeavours to cross with each other. In the limited space where they meet, the information is submitted to a stochastic equation, producing what Deleu called, in an unpublished notebook, a “spatial choreography”.16 We fi nd this choreography in the documents entitled, “clustering of the amenities” or “space arrangement”.17 These are the scores that note the facts, events, accidents, fi gures and forms of functional arrangement: the ar- chitecture of The Unadapted City. It is by force that Deleu brings the project back to the simplicity of a double deduc- tive sequence: it is obtained by deliberate inversion of its ends and means. The spatial model of The Unadapted City is given in its entirety at the outset, its form 16 See Châtel (2001a: 52). 17 The publications show that before Vipcity was embarked on, that is, until Octopus, the plates and diagrams portray- ing these ”clustered amenities” and ”space arrangements” were virtually all the project had in terms of graphic documenta- tion. For Vipcity there is the addition of plans, elevations and cross-sections. D.O.S. ‘98 - Model Dinkytown - ground arrrangement digital drawing, 1999 27 already crystallized. The project develops its discourse – and in fact reveals it- self – after being assembled in this way. Deleu’s stand is to concentrate on the functional, on the comfort and ease given to urban life by suitable equipment and good distribution of services, shops, places for work, leisure and rest. He overlooks the question of how fi t these are as frameworks for interaction and exchange between the inhabitants, for the vitality of a human environment. Every project is assumed to be carried out in terms of the virtuality that is the destination of its object. There is always a conceptualized anticipation in the act of architecture or urbanism. This anticipation is constituted by the expectation of its use, of its appropriation. In The Unadapted City, however, appropriation is not really anticipated but, rather, simulated. Inhabitants remain abstract, they count only in terms of their numbers. Moreover, a project responds to a demand, to a need or a lack. But the relationships that it sets up are of the order of the possible, not of the necessary. That contingency, specifi c to architecture and ur- banism, is controlled by the notion of propriety. In other words, it is governed by judgement and tempered by suitability. Through the reversal that Deleu im- poses on the project, contingency is circumscribed within the closed fi eld delin- eated by the question of functional arrangement. It is a playground and a fi eld for experience where his hand remains totally free. He alone lays down the rules and interprets them. It is the compression of contingency, the neutralization of propriety and the un- derplaying of appropriation which justify the project’s curious name. This city would be ‘unadapted’ because it is liberated from architecture’s conventional straightjacket. One discovers that The Unadapted City is not so much the project of a city as that of an image of the city. This image is given as a reminder of the symbolics of Modernism, the recapture of an emblematic linear city. By its allegiance to the deductive method it is di- rectly related to the work of CIAM IV.18 But this relationship turns out to be dia- lectical. Through its choreography of functional congestion, The Unadapted City presents itself as an antithesis to The Functional City that emerges from the doc- trine of the Charte d’Athènes; the project is a critique of Modernism in terms of its own language.19 What it might mean for our time, however, remains obscure.20 Since the launching of Vipcity, the project has undergone a remarkable change of tack. In spite of the fact that the additional housing is no longer correlated to the infrastructure, the latter still supports urban facilities and organizes public space. The monorail line is marked by huge offi ce buildings hinting at the regu- lar emplacement of the stations. The monumental alignment of these ‘matching buildings’21 punctuates the route slashed into the isotropic carpet of housing lots. The line cuts through an ominous allotment. Thus, eased of the disguise of an illusive urban unity, The Unadapted City can reveal its stubborn actual- ity. The effort of the project is now directed to the details of entwining the in- frastructure, the collective facilities and the public space. An esplanade on sev- eral levels snakes along the infrastructural braid and seems to rebel against the stately dance of the tower blocks. Just as Le Corbusier’s 1931-1939 Plan Obus for Algiers preserved the Kasbah’s gradients, Vipcity spares the tract of the plots. But beyond their shared tolerance of a habitat’s dissipation and conservatism, a com- parison of Vipcity with Plan Obus reveals The Unadapted City’s distinctive features. 18 See Van der Woud (1983: 66). He points out that the election of Cor van Eesteren as new chairman after CIAM III meant that the reliability of a ra- tional approach was preferred to the visionary attitude of Le Corbusier and his supporters. In the Directives of CIAM IV, the new chairman calls this ap- proach “the materialist deduc- tive method” and, while op- posing what he calls “idealistic induction”, he legitimizes it by stating that it corresponds to the common will expressed at the fi rst congress. 19 This is the conclusion reached in Châtel (2001a). 20 In Châtel (2001a: 46), I put forward the hypothesis that for Usiebenpole this critical value is determined by the project’s anachronistic character. In a text going back to 1976, used as introduction, Koolhaas (1995) notes in respect of Bijlmer- meer – a late example (end of the 1960s) of the most radical modernist urbanism – that “if architectural debate is an end- less re-enactment of the son killing the father, then the Bi- jlmer presents a potential re- versal of the oedipal formula, in which the father threatens the son. Instead of Team X attack- ing the mechanistic attitudes of CIAM for a fetishistic obses- sion with the objective and the quantifi able, through the Bijlm- er, CIAM questions - from be- yond the grave as it were - the equally fetishistic concern with the ineffable and the qualitative that characterizes its allegedly humanistic replacement” (Kool- haas 1995: 867). INTERSTICES 07 Le Corbusier forged a symbolic representation of the feast and the disenchantment of modernity (see Tafuri, 1985). Although he regarded the Kasbah as an urbanistic masterpiece, he could not use it directly as a model. “The Kasbah can only remain what it is, outside time, outside modernity and indifferent to its fate” (20). It is the converse of the syncopated experience of time and space written into the sinuous megastructures of Plan Obus. The cascading arabesques isolate and threaten the Kasbah. Quite the opposite of this dramatic assault on the hills of Fort L’Empereur, Vipcity displays all the resignation of mutually accepted defects. The braid and the allotment are at odds with each other, but constitute the conditions of their recip- rocal existence. The choreography of Vipcity is staged in front of a disillusioned crowd of housing lots. What remains today of the city is little more than commod- ity or spectacle. The recreation of the towers is disciplined by the cadence of their funeral march, the linear structure is merely the city’s skeleton, and the winding esplanade represents its dance of death. The Unadapted City is an allegory of the desperate combat waged by the contemporary city against its dislocation. Despite the gulf between them, the formation of Plan Obus matches the Kasbah’s amphitheatre by the transposition of its syncretic qualities. The eternal everyday of the Kasbah is sustained by a pact, an age-old agreement which allowed for the intensive inhabitation of this site. Its body was built up through accumulation, VIPCITY under construction - page 3, digital drawing, 2001 One nautical mile amenities for 9500 inhabitants, 2000-2004 photomontage T.O.P. offi ce 29 piece by piece, a piling that enabled it to straddle this diffi cult gradient. The per- ennial accord is the very condition of its existence. But the Kasbah is not really unchanging; it carries on through incorporation, it is totalizing. Its organic integ- rity is not endangered by the mutation of its cells. Each can be replaced without corrupting the Kasbah’s communal programme or morphology. It was on top of that complex but unifi ed body that Le Corbusier threw out the structures of his Plan Obus. A totalitarian gesture, it conquers the territory and reshapes the landscape. But its bearing is to lend itself to habitat. Dwellings can be fi tted into the gigantic rack of the megastructures without any other constraint than that of shelving. Form fi nds its expression in the length and movement of the course and is by no means affected by the detail of that use. However immense it may be, the difference here engaged is essentially causational. The Kasbah’s morphol- ogy is effected by an awkward topography and by the federated determination of its inhabitants; that of the megastructures by the singular will to redraw the site’s scenography, and by an extensive use of modern technology. The Kasbah’s syncretism is ratifi ed by the signature of Machinism. The notion of the resilience of overall form, as discovered and actualized by Plan Obus, had considerable infl uence on post-CIAM architecture and urbanism. It enabled architects to rid themselves of their attachment to the specifi city of the object, in favour of exploring the expressive force and organizing capacity of a support structure or shape established by accumulation and interconnection of a basic unit. Research in this direction dominated and reunifi ed the architecture and urbanism of the second half of the 1960s. This was the period during which Deleu trained as an architect and began his professional career. Already at that time, he took positions that were at odds with canonical practice. His fi rst exhibi- tion, in 1970, was presented as an announcement of his departure from architec- ture.22 One of the exhibits was a sheet of paper with four photographs of projects then considered as major references. Deleu had boldly crossed them out. In ad- dition to two views of the Marseilles Unité d’Habitation, the collage showed Peter Cook’s Plug-in-City and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 for the Montreal World Fair.23 Today, it is apparent that Deleu’s work fi nds support in the sources he rejected at the time; the Unité is, for instance, an important infl uence for The Unadapted City. A repositioning, that provides for a connection of the Inner Streets to the system’s public infrastructure, indeed seems to take all its measure from the intentionality determining this project.24 As for Plug-in-City and Habitat ’67, each in its own way is also a descendant of Plan Obus. By piling up prefabricated modules like bunch- es of grapes,25 Habitat ’67 recalls the visual and interrelational complexity of the Kasbah. Plug-in-City is like an extensive mechanism conceived as a vine to which housing pods simply have to be hooked up. 21 These pairs of towers - one lying and the other standing - present a series of variants on the phenomenal confi gu- ration of the Barcelona Tow- ers. In this regard see Châtel (1999 & 2001b). Through this arrangement, which relates to his series Lessons in scale and perspective, Deleu engages the building’s formal characteristics in their relationship with the spectator. 22 “Luc Deleu leaves architec- ture in the vacuum for New Di- mensions”, Febr. 1970. 23 For a reproduction of this collage, see Deleu (2002: 33). 24 See Tafuri & Dal Co (1976: 344-45). 25 See Tafuri & Dal Co (1976: 388). Le Corbusier Alger : Urbanisme 1930 © SABAM Belgium 2006. INTERSTICES 07 Deleu himself sees the acts of architecture and urbanism as making available a structure or support that can lend itself to distinctive appropriation. The array of the collective is seen as a condition and guarantee of individual completion. The advent of the city would then occur in the encounter between architecture’s sin- gular formal determination and the chorus of interpretative particular actions. In fact, this hypothesis is to be found throughout his work and serves as justifi cation for the approach adopted in The Unadapted City. Deleu found a convincing repre- sentation of the concept in Le Corbusier’s well-known sketch intended to demon- strate the freedom of habitat within the structures of Plan Obus.26 But this draw- ing, whilst a statement of the intention to retain the diversity of habitat, seems to reduce communal life to cohabitation. Likewise, and equally far from providing any scheme that could lead to the creation of a community, the prototype Habitat ’67 puts forward an image of the richness and complexity of built structure, while Plug-in-City fl aunts itself as a technological fantasy, carefully avoiding any in- volvement with societal questions. The analysis and the critique of the conditions under which building happens, and of its institutional and societal context, were nevertheless of much concern in those days. It was a time of resistance and refl ec- tion. The fact that this attitude produced no lasting results has been attributed to the inability of architects to carry this refl ection to its conclusion, which would have meant questioning their own function and their fi erce attachment to auton- omy.27 Among all the projects of that time, those which are still relevant today are those which stand out as having a radical approach. A project like Archizoom’s No Stop City: 26 He made this an epigraph to Deleu (1990), an issue being entirely devoted to his work. Le Corbusier gave this drawing the ironic caption: “Every architect will make the house he wants, just imagine!” 27 See Tafuri & Dal Co (1976: 390). Collage, 1970 31 does not make a decisive break with what went before – the mod- ern city – but extrapolates it, intensifi es it, accelerates it. The Radicals bring future time closer ... and propose a rear vision that forces one to look at what exists so as to operate its critique. The ‘project’ work amounts to giving explicit form to an invisible reality: to invent or imagine the world that is already there (Rouillard, 1994: 432). All that remains in Plan Obus by way of eloquence and relevance to the present time is due to the shift in viewpoint brought about by its radical moves. The Unadapted City is close to Italy’s architettura radicale to the extent that it performs a savage extrapolation from phenomena detected in reality, but torn from their context and looked at from the new perspective of an autonomous project. Vipcity is just like No Stop City, potentially infi nite and isotropic. Like No Stop City, it turns utopia upside down, replacing an imagined fi nality by the projec- tion of an ‘image’. It is the radicalized image of a devious present, slyly hiding beneath the bubbling of the everyday, seemingly waiting for this one occasion to loom up.28 The last two monographs on Deleu’s project seem aimed at reframing it in con- crete terms. In La ville inadaptée/Luc Deleu (Theys, 2001), the project is presented against a background of site photographs, references to Le Corbusier’s work and images of navigation. Luc Deleu – Urbi et Orbi (Deleu, 2002) contains about fi fteen full-page photographs of Chandigarh today. It is clear that they must serve as imported context, illustrating the informal and apparently chaotic use of equip- ment and land. The pictures of the housing sectors connote the idea that the city comes to life through the interpretative adoption of its structures. But the exact role of the views of the Capitol, such as that of La fosse de la considération (the Trench of Consideration), is more enigmatic. 28 For this idea of utopia be- ing overturned, see Rouillard (1994: 432). Chandigarh building market, Photo : Luc Deleu, © SABAM INTERSTICES 07 Tafuri associates the Capitol’s “listening chambers” with the poetics of the ”unap- peased desires” evoked in the open-air room of Le Corbusier’s Beistégui apart- ment on the Champs Elysées (Tafuri, 1985: 11).29 In that ”room surrounded by emp- ty space” … ”where one can see only fragments of the town’s horizon”, he sees ”the last refuge, ruled by the silence and the wide”(11). It is a place ”of programmed isolation” that ”breaks with any ordinary accord”(11). This silence, which remains ”mercilessly separated from the theoretical landscape to which he entrusts his own social messages”(11), will give way to the din of Plan Obus. But it is the same desire, here turned into unrestrained appetite, that strikes it with the seal of al- ienation. The unifi cation promised by Modernism would remain unattainable. The breach opened by the antithesis of ”perfect rest” and ”frenzied celebration” is endorsed by the disenchantment modelled in the oxymoron of Vipcity. As a project, The Unadapted City revisits architecture’s recent history, recounting its memories of illusion and disappointment. It refl ects on its condition, speculates on its task and destiny. It is in this sense that Le Corbusier’s work serves as a mir- ror. But, already now, the features of the work merge with those of the author. The specular image seems to outline an ideal of ambition and perseverance; that of an intellectual activity that claims to act as a lever on society while at the same time jealously preserving its independence. However eminent the model may be, it is bound to be a mirage. If the poetics of isolation endeavour to reforge architecture from the inside, they also stand for abandonment. By envisioning architecture as introspection they are liable to detach it from this world. By digging into it in search of depth they threaten to leave it empty. In his spiritual testimony, which betrays a large measure of bitterness, ”Father Corbu”30 reminds us in a profession of faith that ”nothing is transmissible but 29 Apartment for Charles de Beistégui, Paris, 1930-31. 30 Le Corbusier (1970). In this text he refers to himself as “Père Corbu.” Chandigarh, Capitol, the trench of consideration Photo : Luc Deleu - © SABAM 33 thought, nobility of the fruit of our labours” (Le Corbusier, 1970: 172). The poetics of isolation dazzle us with their corollary: they designate ‘work’ as one of the last places where the transmission of meaning can be understood as reciprocal: Life comes through men, or else men come through life. In this way all kinds of effects arise. Look at the surface of the water ... Look also at all the sky-blue fi lled with the good that man will have done ..., for in the end, it all comes back to the sea ... (Le Corbusier 1970: 168). References: Bekaert, G. (1991). Luc Deleu, a self-power man. Archis (4), 22-36. Châtel, G. (1999). Luc Deleu. In De Kooning, M. (Ed.), Horta and After, 25 Masters of Modern Architecture in Belgium (pp. 276-287). Ghent: Ghent University. Châtel, G. (2001a). Le projet d’une ville inadaptée. In Theys, H. (Ed.), La ville inadaptée/Luc Deleu (pp. 42-56). Toulouse: Editions Ecocart. Châtel, G. (2001b). Les Tours de Barcelone. In Theys, H. (Ed.), La ville inadaptée/Luc Deleu (p.40). Toulouse: Editions Ecocart. Châtel, G. (2002). De voet en de zeemijl, een architecturale poëtica van de nabijheid en een verte. In Rombauts, W. (Ed.), 10 jaar cultuurprijs KU-Leuven (pp. 26-34). Louvain: K.U.Leuven. Châtel, G. & Davidts, W. (2003). The Lightness and Seriousness of the Project. Janus (4), 32-37. Châtel, G. (2004). Car pour fi nir tout retourne à la mer – Vipcity ou la mise en scène d’une fi liation. Cahiers Thématiques - architecture, histoire/conception (IV- Filiation(s)), 197-210. Davidts, W. (1999). Interview with Luc Deleu, 1st May 1998. In De Meyer, R., Davidts, W & Verschaffel, B. (Eds.), De Ferraris & Conscience, STILLS. Brussels/Ghent: Vlaamse Ge- meenschap. Deleu, L. (1990). Earth, Passengers and Building. Forum (34/1, March), 4-14. Deleu, L. (1991). Luc Deleu & T.O.P. offi ce, 1967-1991, exhibition catalogue. Antwerp: MUH- KA. Deleu, L. (1996). The Unadapted City - Work in Progress - NAi96, exhibition catalogue. Rot- terdam: NAi Publishers. Deleu, L. (2002). Urbi et Orbi. Ghent & Amsterdam: Ludion. 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