It was in 1968 at the Royal Academy of Architecture in Brussels that the French architect Jean-Louis Chanéac presented his “Manifesto of Insurrectionary Architecture” to the public for the first time.Chanéac called for the construction of large quantities of parasitic cells or “habitable volumetric elements” on the façades of housing complexes.

Read the full article in AA 438 — Parasites ; an issue written with our guest editor, the artist Tadashi Kawamata. Please visit our online shop.

In 1971, Marcel Lachat suspended one such so-called ‘suction cup’ on the façade of a low-cost housing block in Geneva. “I met Marcel Lachat in Romont, Switzerland in 1969. He had started studying architecture in Geneva where he met architect Pascal Haüsermann. He made his pirate or parasitic cell by using a weather balloon as a lost mold and by injecting polyurethane foam inside,” Chanéac specified in a letter addressed to François Barré, then secretary general of the Centre de création industrielle.

The rapid growth of our conurbations, the transformation of our society and the demographic explosion have led the authorities to create urban plans at the city scale, and then at the regional planning scale. The administrative machinery thus created has become extremely cumbersome, constituting an intolerable brake on dynamic forces, on impulses, on immediate needs, on life itself. On the other hand, on the architectural level, a huge misunderstanding has arisen. The visionaries of the turn of the century denounced decadent ornamentation, useless spaces, and structural lies. However, the struggle that was necessary then has given a clear conscience to those who build today’s large housing estates.

The precious useless spaces have disappeared, and forms have been rendered as simply as possible under the pretext of rationalization.

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