11/05/2021
• "THE GENEVA SCHOOL" TESTIMONIES:
ALAIN LÉVEILLÉ: "At the moment, I am working on the plan of «public areas and sites to be classified» of 1936. I redraw where the grid passes and how it interacts with the existing. This plan is full of finesse and attention to the territory: the slightest inflection, the slightest hedge... As Elena Cogato Lanza showed in her thesis, among the four authors of the plan: Maurice Braillard, head of the Department of public works, Albert Bodmer, head of the Urban Planning Department, it is the architects and planners Hans Bernoulli et Arnold Hoechel who are the real protagonists. Of course I can’t prove it but I’m almost certain that first of all, there is the morphological aspect which goes to Hoechel, a meticulous and attentive architect. And at the other end, there is Bernoulli, a Basel socialist and theorist of the municipalisation of the soil. Rather than expropriating the entire canton, one or the other, perhaps Bernoulli, proposed to trace over the entire territory a grid that covers the woods, the watercourses, etc. What remains outside the grid is the private domain. These are the large agricultural lands, urban blocks and isolated housing colonies. The mesh remains the public domain. This is what ultimately makes it possible to master the shape and distribution of the territory. This plan is incredibly attentive to the context".
"I think that if there is a Geneva School, it lies in a particular attention to the territory".
ALAIN LÉVEILLÉ is an architect. He was Corboz’s teaching assistant at the University of Montréal (Canada), where he taught from 1967 to 1980. He also taught at the École Architecture, Université Genève, EAUG and the Institut of Architecture, University of Geneva, IAUG (Swizerland) between 1973 and 2007. He was the director of the Center of Research for the Urban Renovation (CRR) in Geneva until 2009. •
PUBLICATION: "TÉMOIGNAGES D’UNE ÉCOLE (L’ÉCOLE DE GENÈVE, SWITZERLAND)" by Eunate Torres Modrego in TRACÉS 23-24 , Switzerland /2017 • Laboratoire Postgrade "Architecture et Paysage" IAUG •
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