Basic HTML Version
59
certain that he would not live to see its completion. On
the other hand, he was certain that what he built would
last. Of course, the very notion of time was different
then from what it has become in the industrialised
world over the last two centuries. Things are entirely
different today. The speed with which building usages
change, and the fragility of techniques and materials,
have resulted (after some trial and error) in the invention
of quick ways to modify spaces thanks to the plan libre,
the replacement of materials and the re-adaptation of
structures. The problems of long-term durability that
one began to see forty years ago have now become
questions of survival. A wide range of cultures – even
within the same country – evoke an equally wide range
of responses to ‘social control’.
Under these circumstances, only an organisation capa-
ble of handling both the formal and technical design
of structures, and of connecting this conception to the
landscape, urban planning and design in general, will be
able to take on the twenty-first century and ‘enter into
it’ as Jean Duvignaud
5
said about the twentieth cen-
tury. Philippe Samyn and his partners have answered
these problems with a specific structure for collectively
designing projects. The efficiency and effectiveness
graphs provide demonstrations of how the office is
organised to respond. Certainly, other types of organisa-
tions could be set up and function in an efficient man-
ner. Consider, for example, the most common model,
which is the temporary association of specialised
offices for solving particular problems. Overstating the
case somewhat, one doesn’t need the skills of a naval
engineer to build an overpass or a contemporary dwell-
ing. No matter how willing, competent or imaginative
he or she might be no single person can respond to
the entire range of problems that construction poses.
Seen in this light, it seems to me that designer(s) and
builder(s) should go forward together. However, it would
be suicidal to leave the responsibility for the choice of
construction techniques up to one business. I referred
to this in the first chapter when I spoke of assembly-line
urban projects that did considerable harm to urban and
regional planning. Beyond purely ideological questions,
it seems that an ethics of architecture, engineering and
urban planning is based in an awareness of the multi-
plicity of problems posed and the need to find solutions
for them. I would like to add that this book, which inves-
tigates thirty-five years of the work of Philippe Samyn
and his team, is neither a retrospective nor a catalogue
raisonné, but rather a panorama that I hope is as rep-
resentative as possible. An oeuvre is never complete,
a thought is never frozen in time and a commentary is
never definitive. In the same way, the work of Philippe
Samyn is open-ended and continues to evolve each day
before our eyes.
1
See in particular David Watkin, Morale et architecture aux
xix
e
et
xx
e
siècles, Brussels-Liège, Mardaga, 1979, and the majority of the writings
of Henry van de Velde.
2
Françoise Choay, L’urbanisme, utopie et réalités, Paris, Le Seuil, 1965.
3
Philippe Boudon, Sur l’espace architectural, Essai d’épistémologie
de l’architecture, Paris, Dunod, 1971.
4
Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, Cambridge,
ma
,
The
mit
Press, 1999.
5
Jean Duvignaud, Pour entrer dans le
xx
e
siècle, Paris, Grasset, 1960.