On 8 January 2025, Françoise Choay, historian of urban and architectural theories and forms, emeritus university professor and author of numerous works on urban planning, died.

---

In the 1950s, her philosophy studies led her down the path of art criticism, along which she wrote for magazines such as L’Œil and L’Observateur. In 1960, she wrote a book on the work of Le Corbusier and, a few years later, an anthology of texts on urbanism (L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités. Une anthologie, Seuil, Paris, 1965) featuring no fewer than 37 authors. In 1978, Françoise Choay defended a thesis on the ‘spatial utopias’ of Alberti and Thomas More, entitled ’Étude structurale des textes instaurateurs du milieu bâti’ [Structural study of texts establishing the built environment. Ed.], published in 1980 under the title La Règle et le Modèle (Paris, Seuil). At the time, she was teaching at the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes (the future Université Paris VIII), an institution born out of the Mai 68 spirit, where a ‘progressive’ pedagogy and a teaching approach close to the human and social sciences were being developed. It was there, in 1969, that a department of urban planning was created, which would later become the Institut français d’urbanisme. Françoise Choay taught there until the 1990s.

In La Règle et le Modèle, the historian points out that Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1452) and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) were initially nothing more than ‘spatial utopias’ that were later transformed into paradigms for architectural treatises. Yet it is from this source that urbanism as we know it has drawn its inspiration, whether to reproduce a ‘model’ (More) or to extend the city using a ‘generative rule’ (Alberti) – Françoise Choay mixing urbanism and linguistics (as she did several times in AA, in 1967 [‘De l’urbanisme : histoire, sémiologie, science, sociologie et philosophie”, No. 132] or in 1970 [‘Remarques à propos de sémiologie urbaine’]) to defend a sensitive approach to the urban landscape.

In the 1990s, she turned to the study of heritage, and in 1996 published L’Allégorie du patrimoine, in which she wrote: ‘The purpose of a monument is to revive in the present a past that has been swallowed up by time. [It] has a different relationship with living memory and with time. In 1996, on the occasion of the exhibition Métamorphoses parisiennes at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Françoise Choay wrote a text for the eponymous catalogue entitled ‘De la démolition’ (On demolition): ‘All cultures and all societies have been constituted and developed by demolition’. ‘The notion of demolition is thus related to that of conservation in two different ways. In other words, for today’s historian and critic, the concepts of demolition and conservation form two pairs, one of which applies to the traditional behaviours of our societies and the other to those of an emerging technological civilisation. It’s a bold position, which AA wanted to reproduce in 2011 for its ‘Patrimoines’ issue, and which Françoise Choay introduced as follows:

When L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui asked me permission to republish De la démolition in this review, I was all the more surprised that I had forgotten this episode of my journalistic career, and the violent controversy that ensued. However, I have not disowned this text even after careful review, and even though its didactic approach needed to lightened. On the other hand, the lexicographical research that I am carrying out at the moment provides manifest confirmation of the theory defended, identically applicable to: Living languages with their own identities, products of the specificity of the cultures to which they belong ; and material constructions of all kinds (city, village, landscape, detached houses, facilities, wash houses, drinking troughs, stables, etc.) which, through a material location, provide a visible symbolic foundation to the volatility of language. Similar to the languages whose material expression they are, buildings of all kinds depend on three conditions: a permanent basis that is more or less inalienable, out-of-date and archaic constructions that must be eliminated, and to replace them, new constructions required by the evolution of life.

Whether or not you agree with the historian’s position, AA suggests you reread this controversial text, which proves – because it is still disturbing, at a time when the profession is constantly questioning the validity of the very act of building – that there are no thinkers more relevant than those whose writings cross the cities of all centuries, Françoise Choay in the lead.

Click on the image below to read Françoise Choay's full text.

---