One Last Modular Game. Taller de Arquitectura and Le Petite Cathèdrale

Abstract

In 1971, while the Taller de Arquitectura was beginning the pro- ject for Walden 7, the team received the commission to build a housing complex in the ville nouvelle of Cergy-Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris. Continuing with the working method that began with the book “Towards a Formalization of the City in Space”, the Taller established a construction system for the pro- ject of 1000 homes, which they would call Le Petite Cathédrale, based on working with models and creating a clear spatial order. However, unlike the Walden 7 project, this small cathedral began to address the concerns of the Taller members, seek- ing formal relationships with the architecture present in the Mediterranean city. For the team, in this project, the form is the “what,” the final objective, and the “how” is the Carte- sian arrangement of the modules. Thus, Le Petite Cathédrale becomes the last example of the team’s modular work; an unbuilt project that marks the end of a line of research, that of the city in space, and opens the door to a new attitude in approaching a project, based on form and image.