Paper Architecture: Bureaucracy and Reform after 1968

This paper examines the origins of architectural programming in France in the years around 1968. It looks at the work of a team of young technocrats led by François Lombard, an engineer obsessed with a new system of design that would replace the architect as the primary author of the architectural project. It tells the story of how Lombard’s system emerged from reform movements in architectural education and practice, concluding with its deployment in the project for the Centre Pompidou. The programming group’s methods provided one of the ways by which architecture navigated the new computerized world of the late-1960s and early-1970s. They offer us an early picture of a new mode of collective, anonymous, and bureaucratic authorship that found creativity in surprising places and shaped one of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings long before the involvement of its architects.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.58

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1