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Luc Deleu:the architect ought to stop asking himself why his work is not art.

The Unadapted City (D.O.S. = De Onaangepaste Stad) is a concept based on long-term theoretical research and on Luc Deleu’s commitment as an actor in public space. The re-conceptualisation of urban space on so large a scale is based on studies realized during the eighties, such as "Scale and Perspective", and the infrastructural projects which were to follow (namely HST). His participation in a Summer conference in Vienna in 1994 lead to the development of a proposal for an island between the Danube and one of its ramifications: Usiebenpole.
This organism conceived as a 22 km long linear city(1), was designed for 120.000 inhabitants. Its distribution scheme is of quintessential importance for the development of The Unadapted City, because it formulated its underlying principles which are at odds with the usual way of organising an urban development. Subsequently, an atlas of facilities for large-scale urban developments, consisting of 10 plates in different languages (according to the inspiration of the moment) was developed.

Three critical propositions constitute the base of this research:
-urbanism does not interfere with private life, but guarantees individual liberties
-urbanism confines itself to defining necessary suitable volumes, infrastructures and services
-urbanism establishes qualitative limitations for institutions and multinationals for the benefit of all.

The exceptional nature of The Unadapted City lies in its approach of urban planning from its extremities : on the one hand, based on knowledge or the whole of those rough data one ought to be able to find in books, hence more specifically the statistical substructure, on the other hand from its conclusion, its end result, namely its morpholigical structure and concrete form. Both are defined by the wording and fixed by their own internal logic. The first is the product of a patient and meticulous study. The second is simply stated and presented as a piece of evidence, hurriedly composed - I dare to say- rigged up - from the remnants of the history of the discipline.(La Ville Inadaptée, p52)2. It is in these terms that Guy Châtel interprets this large work in progress at which Luc Deleu has been working over the past ten years and he gives some clues to a possible reading; in between the lines, one can also read here a criticism of urbanistic strategies with which commercial and political methods often make their tricks. Going into detail thousands of examples could be given, like for instance numerous restrictive prescriptions for garden houses while Coca-Cola will never be required to use Helvetica beige in view of a good integration of their billboards in the aesthetics of a given neighbourhood…

In The Unadapted City, the resources of construction and architecture are first and foremost applied in function of the possibilities of interesting public spaces within the logic of the large scale, rejecting the inherited typologies of the traditional city as these are totally unadapted to the demographic explosion which can be considered as a global phenomenon.

In a sense, it could be stated that Luc Deleu takes up the Manière de penser l’urbanisme where Le Corbusier had left it, but adds a critical stand, justified by the crisis in modern architecture and urbanism stimulated by the explosion of targets in the post-modern era.
For Deleu, Le Corbusier constitutes a point of reference in the sense that, towards the end of a life of research, he has understood a reality which is still ours: in Chandigarh (Punjab), a city which he had to plan (the urbanistic plan of the site dates from 1951 when Corbu was 64 years old), he chose to focus his activities on space, infrastructure and public buildings, thus leaving individuals free with respect to their domestic environment. This means saying that - and this message is directed to all of us - in a great many cases, architects would do better to abstain. As far as living is concerned, the microcosms designed as architectural manifestoes - with all pretentions this entails - are generally vain.

In the course of his development, Deleu often took up stands radically at odds with the corporatist practices in architecture and urbanism blinded by the logic of copyrights and the cult of the media figure, and, more often still, determined by short-time thinking, if not altogether of a mercantile nature. In the meantime, the degeneration of the urbanism school of thought lead to the big discord between the neo-nostalgic practice and the “generic city” approach, actually two ways to back out of the problems of conceiving a city in its entirety.

Deleu uses the same tools as notorious city planners - numeric plans (with layers and extrusions), databases, territorial data … - however not with the same attitude. Where seriousness prevails most (as in official commissions), the authors of a given project rarely show their pleasure; however, one could suspect it from the projects they try to have "passed", argumented with style. As for Deleu, he certainly does not avoid pleasure and he mobilises all means to make it clear; it is one of the motives he puts forward. This leads to the question: how can urbanism be generous without comprising an element of fun, or even humour ?

What Deleu proposes is not so much "a solution", but rather a way of thinking by changing the nature of the debate. This implies that he relativizes the appearance of the urban organisms he is studying. After ten years of work, he did arrive at a form, but it is not an end in itself. It is a way of testing working hypotheses on their relevance and of stimulating research, including what is beyond the field of vision, without omitting the resources of imagination and of coincidence. How many city plans have not been patched together under the pretext of seriousness, in a few months’ time and imposed upon tens of thousands of people? After ten years of persistent labour, Deleu has arrived at this form, a fragment of which, a mile of Vipcity, is the central object of the exhibition - VALUES - at the M HKA. This TGM (Très Grande Maquette) with its polystyrene foam base of 113 cm (in keeping with the Modulor), is the elaboration over a length of 1825 cm, of a sea mile, being the length of an arch of one meridian minute on this planet on a scale of 1/100. It is just another way of showing the scale on which this segment has been conceived. Because this version is very detailed, no doubt it will provoke certain types of criticism, for instance the dated aspect of the formal vocabulary which goes back to the sixties has already been pointed out, or otherwise the naiveness of the proposal's political significance. So be it. Most important is not to get stuck in a first judgment, but rather think about the meaning of this deployment which assumes the image of a model, without ever becoming petrified into an image of a "construction" that remains hypothetical.

The assessment of the impossibility to design a city in all its constituent parts, and that existing cities are never "up to date" is a proof of common sense. One of the reasons is a result of the obsession with the "adapted" form. The adaptation of an architectural or urban organism to a situation, a function, or to the desire for an image implies that it will be outdated by the time the context has changed. Well, nobody fails to notice the changeable evolution of contexts, certainly under the influence of demographic pressure. Consequently, it is less a matter of provocation, but much more of lucidity on the part of Luc Deleu when he suggests the idea of the Unadapted, both rational AND irrational, as a means to face certain sensitive urban realities in the large global metropolises (the traditional patrimonial town masks these realities). An other way of expressing has to do with resisting the traps of politically correct architecture, which Deleu denounces by placing critical and even humoristic symbols versus serious clichés.

The heart of the problem is the creation of ensembles with constructions that can be used freely and interconnected in a "learned, correct and splendid" manner by means of infrastructures of transport and services able to deal with changes of needs, without losing their quality.

Consequently, the scheme of the linear city is not "the solution" here, because it does not correspond to the phantasms prevalent during the early period of Luc Deleu, such as the bridge cities or the space cities of Yonah Friedman, the New Babylon of Constant Nieuwenhuys or the multimedia visions of Archigram. However, the contemporary generation’s renewed attention for the way of thinking of the sixties is quite meaningful, yet in a certain - undoubtedly more pragmatic - manner, Luc Deleu concentrates on some ideas he develops further, with the ambition to contribute to the reflexive patrimony of urbanistic prospective thought, not in a utopian, but in a theoretical (and atypical) manner. When he points at the fact that Boullée still is a point of reference in our times, we better understand the place he assigns to Le Corbusier in his objective laboratory.

Those who pretend that The Unadapted City is a utopian project are the same as those who think that lack of space will not get more problematic, that the quality of life will simply be enhanced in time and that, in the near future, we will not be confronted with changes of a social nature. In the end, and in their euphoria, these same people confirm that architecture and urbanism have no other purpose left but the spatial translation of social exclusion and duality. (La Ville Inadaptée, p. 69).

It is a laboratory indeed with a radical dimension and the determination this research requires contributes, year after year, to the extension of the projective patrimony. Luc Deleu operates on the basis of a successive incorporation of reflective corpuses. For instance, he does not hesitate to borrow elements from his previous work, elements that have their own logic, their own history and, most of all, their own meaning, in order to integrate them in the processes in progress. Fundamentally anachronistic, his work acquires form in function of the necessities of the vision he develops and not the other way round.

Usiebenpole has led to a first formulation of The Unadapted City within the logic of scale increase, first with Bingbong (6.800 inhabitants), later Brikabrak and Dinkytown, linear entities corresponding to increasingly larger groups of people and combined in Octopus, which is partitioned over eight directions (38.000 inhabitants), all included in Vipcity, which adds an interpretation of the equality principle of allotments to the infrastructural strings (76.000 inhabitants); the next step being Notforyou (152.000 inhabitants)… Each time these fragments imply a progression of the preceding stages, even if also parallel projects are produced, for instance Halfweg (60.000 inhabitants).

The titles are always humorous and show an essential dimension of the theoretical background: the literal stake of the research. For instance, the stations of Vipcity's monorail (Powerpoint, Unité, Dymaxion, Broadacre, Chandigarh, Domino, Generic, Mercator,…) are a perfect illustration of references by an individual whose heroes, Le Corbusier, Tintin, Bob Dylan and Henry Miller, belong to the collective imagination. The plans of Vipcity are not just extraordinary "scores" with structures based on rigorous disorder and of a poetical nature, they are also very beautiful visual events revealing the formidable resources that shape them, as well as the potential they contain.

Step by step and with an impressive coherence, the development of The Unadapted City is based on the efficiency of the concept of orbanism (Orbanistic Manifesto, 1980) which derives its power from a non-dualistic type of logic; it is the open, fluctuating and unpredictable integration of what makes a city - that is to say: what organises or disrupts it - that constitutes its very basis. The consequence is that solid structures are required to withstand the jerks, deformations and anomalies. And these structures achieve their highest degree of resistance - of consistency - together with their highest capacity of serviceability (and of pleasure).
Le Corbusier already replaced the word "urbanism" by "equipment" (Précisions, p. 143); it is in keeping with this reflection that Deleu places his line of conduct : The central theme of The Unadapted City is the search for an unprecedented form and organisation of what makes a city into a city, for what makes daily life pleasant and bestows sense upon public space : an autonomous, three-dimensional and monumental (infra)structure, an example of the contemporary collaboration between the private and the public sector; attractive public transport and a pleasant public space uplifted to a symbol of the collective identity ; an urban public space, controlled and controllable inside, outside and under the urban porches, and equipped with a public transport system conceived as a horizontal lift; a space-park / park-space for pedestrians in symbiosis with the peripheral space for car traffic; attractions and accommodations for motorists, transit stations for motorists and pedestrians, a public space in free space.(La Ville Inadaptée, p. 62)

Because of the architectonic registers Deleu employs, this attitude, though bearing evidence of common sense, might be confusing. It should not be forgotten that we are dealing with manipulable bases for a complex form of reflection and that these bases correspond to an objective of clarity. Upon quiet consideration of one after the other, they are perfectly legible and, in spite of their incompleteness, reveal their content without ambiguity; this is much too rare a quality which deserves to be emphasized. Since he cannot deal with everything at the same time, Deleu limits himself to the logical development of one base to different scales (what generally can be done least of all). In order to understand all the implications this entails, an evenly radical and free expression of the other components of the inhabited territory should be imagined. Then, the visual qualities and the technical mastery catch the eye; Deleu's work is a hybrid of the mastery of the craftsman, the engineering model and the toys of the "enfant terrible" - his scale models show it -, in his graphic work or in his plans, the desires of the painter are crossed with the poetics of the statistician and his texts reveal his everlasting wish to explain his motivations, the directions he takes and the liberties he allows himself. Architecture? Art? That is not the question! The concept of the artist-architect fashionable in the nineties is not applicable to Luc Deleu (for it conveys too much the image of architects playing at being artists and vice versa). At times, he develops his theoretical argumentation, of which there is ample proof, then again he builts houses, gives lectures, realises exhibitions of different aspects of his work, goes sailing on the high seas, then again he observes the inhabited world; his work is less statement than rhythm; it is sufficient to observe the metaphorical importance of the scores in the organisation of sequences of The Unadapted City to understand this. Conductor of an orchestra ? Rather author-composer-man-orchestra, waiting for tactics applicable to urban situations calling for mutations (and alternative approaches for neo-koolhaasian precepts). Is there a risk of megalomania ? Let us look at what he constructs: without any orthodoxy, he plays with heterogeneity, makes fun regulatory absurdities, tries out his abilities at playing with scale and the power of composite forms. The houses designed by Deleu are not blow-ups of scale-models (even if they retain a certain "scale-model aspect"), they have nothing to do with the tricks used for the aesthetic transfer of one scale level to another; his houses are as complex and disparate as life itself, but nevertheless have a strong and multiple identity and are not devoid of "spelling mistakes". They are neither unequivocal objects, nor are they talismans. They are imperfect trials and proud of it; sort of pulling faces at what is as "it ought to be", an enjoyment also as a tribute to children, those great architects. Deleu's scale-models are scale-models and nothing else, which implies that they have an intrinsic value of their own and that they constitute valuable elements in the explanation of a process. It is not exceptional that architects or artists (not to mention certain critics) adopt a critical attitude with regard to Deleu's methods; for it is true that they do not fit within any framework. They contain their own internal coherence and their far-reaching heteronomy only makes sense within the logic of orbanism. The exhibitions and the publications are the report of a research, and if a certain schematic aspect predominates in the details, then, as his oeuvre expands, the attempt to document everything as it is, - see the numerous photographs of building sites in his publications - leads to the opposite of media strategies oh so necessary to convince us that such demiurge is still getting it up or that such pirouette appeared to be impossible until quite recently. We are confronted with a different kind of attitude here, unfolding its little surprises as the argument broadens. One of the driving forces of Deleu's work is humour - also exceptional in the production of urbanists - which accords an objective place to coincidence, going as far as the incorporation of stochastic equations and which makes use of resources of the second grade in order to confirm his determination.

Having said this, it needs to be pointed out that, from the end of the sixties onwards, or for almost thirty-five years, Luc Deleu has always steered the same course and his line of conduct appears to be more and more non-doctrinairian. The exhibitions in the Autumn of 2004 offer a unique, yet provisional opportunity to define the position (in the maritime sense), to know where Deleu and T.O.P. Office stand, as well as to appreciate where the world is at in the meantime…

If the title of the exhibition organised in the Espace Architecture La Cambre appears to have a Proustian connotation, this is not a coquetry. It needs to be known that, during his second long sea voyage To the other end of the world, Deleu did in fact read Proust (the first volumes of la Recherche in the original text). And, in its own way, The Unadapted City serves the purpose of the lengthy work of an author (of a project) on his own (in the world), who is questioning his own motives and giving explanations about the field of research he reinvents as his work takes shape.

Le Corbusier who – and let us not forget this – was also a painter and a sculptor, talked about art in these terms: Art, that is to say the way in which things are done (Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, p.234). The remark of Luc Deleu, who would prefer architects to stop asking themselves why what they are doing is not art, can be understood in the sense of Corbu's comment [Marcel Duchamp, in turn, reminded us that anyway, the word art, etymologically, simply means "doing/making" (Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, p121]). There is no fundamental difference between what Luc Deleu is showing in a museum and what he constructs on an allotment site; there is simply a change of scale and of type of site, implying that it is "made" in a different manner. The area of application - its reach - can be situated in reality or in the the virtual domain; either way, his proposals are unadapted: in the museum, the usual criteria of interpretation are rather inapplicable and the same goes for the allotments. Having said this, he might just as well propose to adapt (yes, indeed !) Vipcity to a certain site, a brand new proposal and revealed in the exhibition at the M HKA; in order to confirm the paradoxical dimension of the argumentation. Each aspect of his work, whether theoretical or practical, assumes legible forms and shapes, always slightly shifted in relation to the situations and all stimulated by the metaphor of the building site.

An example: Orbino, a piece which was recently installed on a permanent basis in the sculpture park of the Middelheim Museum (Antwerp). In order to "enhance" the work, Luc Deleu has decided to "enhance" the park itself by creating a new infrastructure of walkways in a new part of the park still seldom visited by the public and where some other artworks-dwellings are located. Consequently, he has literally created a public space to install the work which, in its turn, is also made accessible. In addition to its quality of modular monument and consequently of its archetypical dimension, the object simply is a transcription on the scale of the sculpture park of something which might occur somewhere in the scale-model of Vipcity. The installation is simple, its meanings are explicit, yet, the pleasure it procures - in its entirety - has to do with a very complex form of imagination (a token of plurality), something special that happens somewhere in the unadapted…

Raymond Balau, August 1st, 2004

(1) in this respect, it needs to be pointed out that the building site of the Ciudad lineal by Arturo Soria y Mata was started in Madrid in 1894

(2) References to publications from which some parts have been quoted in the above text:
La Ville Inadaptée / Luc Deleu, un livre de Hans Theys, Editions Ecocart, Toulouse, 2001.
Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (1930), Fondation Le Corbusier, Editions Altamira, Paris, 1994.
Le Corbusier, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches (1937), Editions Gonthier, Bibliothèque Médiations, Paris, 1971.
Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (1960-61), André Dimanche Editeur / INA, Marseille, 1994.