BADANI/ROUX-DORLUT ARCHITECTES

“It is a paradox of modernity that is symptomatically highlighted by the work of Daniel Badani and Pierre Roux-Dorlut. As the historian Jacques Gubler suggested regarding their mentor Eugène Beaudoin, this is what might well serve to further undermine ‘the preconception, propagated by Le Corbusier, that the teaching organised at the École des Beaux-Arts represents the antithesis of architectural modernity’.
From the urban plan for Abidjan to Nouveau Créteil, from the first nuclear facilities to the development of the Sèvres bridgehead, the work of Badani and Roux-Dorlut spans the entire field of architectural practice of their time. It draws on tradition to better establish the present.
Tracing its course might enable us to grasp the extent to which, as Gilles Deleuze asserted, ‘in all modernity, in all novelty, there is both conformism and creativity’. Separating the conformist from the untimely would thus be ‘the task of those who know how to love and who are the true destroyers and creators at one and the same time.’”