Cells in rows! Multicoloured and growing. Between a psychological test and a grid of new visual art, the cover of the April-May 1968 issue is as enigmatic as a Mayan prophecy. The orange banner, however, tells us what to expect: this issue’s theme is universities.

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui therefore got it right and felt the discontent rising: a publication at the heart of the protests. You must go to page 55 to finally find the traces of this cover, of this “development pattern” of Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Through this “scattered” pattern, its architects, Arup and Associates, planned a project for 5,000 students according to a framework which would allow for the growth of major and minor elements. There are plenty of such diagrams across the issue, with universities seemingly losing all humanity and becoming theoretical objects, mathematical cages. The “anti-city” is even championed in a long article by Guido Canella, an Italian architect. Without any spontaneity or surprise, universities find themselves in the “middle of the countryside”. Proliferating, they develop regular forms according to abstract plans. For Bochum University in Germany, AA reproduces the critics of students published in Bauwelt: “It is a good and useful thing that it is students (and not specialists or students of architecture) who brought about a discussion about the Ruhr University”. Among them, Raoul Hübner states that “the obsession with building –all in the same place– united in constructive ideology, with considering the university as an independent installation, like a monstrous habitat due to its dimensions, is something mad, something anti-functional”. This is the essence of May‘68 and the protests of the rear guard and also of the vanguard!

Read this article in the issue n°424 of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, available in our online shop.