Sounding off

Lines composed on the second floor of the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern. 
– Frank O'Hara

Fingernails on chalkboards. Dentist drills. Beeping airport carts. Yappy dogs. Reversing semi-trailers, crying babies, jackhammers. Nickelback. We Are The World. My own voice. The list is endless. At the top right now is the sound the elevator in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville makes when it reaches one of the library’s two floors. Not a simple ding or dong, irritating enough in a librarial context, but a very loud and objectionable two-tone “ee-ong” chime, like the bray of a robot donkey. “Ee-ong” when it arrives. “Ee-ong” when it departs. “Ee-ong” again when it stops on the next floor. Again, and again, and again. All. Day. Long.

Why? This is a library. Libraries are meant to be sanctuaries of silence, noiseless places of mute study and hushed perusal. Next to tombs the quietest places in human society. Why this constant ee-onging? The elevator is only used by librarians, and only when they are burdened with book carts. There is no need to announce their arrivals and departures, no need to warn us, their comings and goings pose no danger. Who cares? Why this incessant ee-onging, over and over, “EE-ONG, EE-ONG, EE-ONG, EE-ONG”?

OK. I’ll stop. My family and friends find my preoccupation with the sound that the elevator in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville makes when it reaches and leaves one of its two floors weirdly and wildly disproportionate. No one else seems to mind it, they say. Which is true. And which I find equally disturbing. Why don’t the other quiet-as-mice people in the otherwise fish-quiet library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville find the incessant ee-onging of the elevator hugely annoying? Because they are too young and stupid to notice? No. Because they are too exhausted from pulling all-nighters, working around-the-clock to get their projects done, training for their bleak futures in architectural agencies where weeks of 4-am departures from the office followed by all-night sessions fuelled by junk food and drugs to meet les deadlines for projects that stand little chance (less that 30%) of winning architectural competitions or appels à projets are the norm?

No.

Because they are wearing wireless earbuds. Because they are all listening to We Are The World, or its equivalent, over and over and over.

We Are Not The World. And just now, again. EE-ONG! Ten seconds later. EE-ONG!

So wear headphones, my family and friends say. Listen to Nickelback.

This reminds me, just now, long forgotten, of a six-month episode of my life that occurred well before Nickleback, even before We Are The World, when I was a university student, living with a roommate in a second-floor apartment at 1840 W Broadway, and a mysterious noise, coming from the apartment right above our living room, a patternless smacking sound, a soft and oft-repeated thud of something falling or being randomly dropped, plagued me for the duration of my time there, and was not rendered explicable until half a dozen years later, when, in another city, I discovered that a newly met friend was the former tenant of the third-floor apartment on Broadway of six years before, as was his brother, who had also by then become something of a friend, and both of them at that earlier time, when they lived above my head, were obsessive, but terrible, hackysackers.

Plop. Ten seconds later. Plop. Fifteen seconds later. Plop. Seven seconds. Plop. Fourteen. Plop. And so on, all day long, well into the night. Plop, plop, plop.

Fortunately, the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville closes at five. And I don’t live here. And playing with les sacs Hacky is probably not allowed in the library. But can this situation also be rendered explicable? I imagine the elevator was programmed in the factory and no one on the library staff knows how to turn it off. Such is the case with the electronic door entry system in our building, which announces, when the code is correctly entered or the right type of keyfob waved, “LA PORTE EST OUVERTE”, as if the door’s actual, physical opening, its swinging towards you with a loud click, didn’t already make this abundantly clear.

One more thing. To arrive at the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville one must cross a wide inner courtyard sustainably landscaped with low scrub and dominated by two large and leafy maple trees. Very nice. However, the walkway is constructed of slippery-when-wet slats of wood — small plastic warning signs, the kind you see on newly mopped hospital floors, indicate the litigious level of their slipperiness — and, worse, to this walker at least, each slat is attached to its supporting sleeper by four Phillips screws, and these Phillips screws, which the French call vis Phillips or vis cruciformes, are in no way harmoniously aligned with each other, but are, rather, randomly screwed into the planks here, there, and then there, hither and then thither, willy and then nilly.

Why? Is this intentional? The École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville was founded during the évènements¹ of Mai 68 by a dissident group of students at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, l'atelier collégial, led by Bernard Huet, a former student of Louis Kahn’s. The group renounced the academicism that at that time dominated the study of architecture in France. They wanted to draw on and cross over and into and with other disciplines, and “proceed by analogy, by mutual enrichment, in order to raise awareness of architecture and its limits in its historical, ideological, sociological and philosophical implications.”

Does this explain the aleatory rhythms of the Phillips screws? No. The annoying ee-ong of the elevator in the library? No. But, as Heidegger once said, every questioning is a seeking. “Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.” But, as is often overlooked, or forgotten, or ignored, Heidegger was a Nazi. And Phillips screws, which were invented by a man named John P. Thompson, are sometimes in English called crosshead screws. Are these screws an exhibition of the espoused anti-academic crossheaded-disciplinarianism of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville? No. Last week Patriarch Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church since 2009 – the year that the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville moved into this location, a purposely designed space in a former technical lycée across the street from my apartment – compared Emmanuel Macron, the President of the French Republic, to a “little reptilian-eyed peacock sodomite who bewitches swarms of blissful woodlice but will end up plucked and roasted like the Beast of Tunguska.” I can find no reference to this Beast in this or in any other library, except for a single entry on a website called tvtropes.org that tells me that the term “Beast of Tunguska” was sometimes used as an alternative moniker for Sir Richard Hawksmoore, a character from the UK sci-fi comic book series Nikolai Dante (2000-2012).

Tunguska itself is best known, of course, according to Wikipedia, for the Tunguska event (“occasionally also called the Tunguska incident”):

an approximately 12-megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest…

The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size. The asteroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph) (~Ma 80). It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than having hit the surface of the Earth.

The people of the Tunguska region are Turkic, and their culture, including music, has some similarities to the culture of Tuva, a neighbouring region to the south. In both regions throat-singing is practiced, often accompanied by a two-stringed instrument called the khomys, and by a host of flutes and whistles, including the pyrghy, a large, conical, sucked wooden trumpet used for shamanic sessions and to attract elk, red deer and Siberian deer, and the shagy, made of sheep’s knucklebone and used to attract sheep. Both produce sounds achingly similar to the elevator’s ee-ong.

Is it the randomness of the crosshead screws that I find objectionable? No. Does it matter? No.

Today, the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville is busy. The classrooms, however, are empty. The workshops, however, are full. The 1,324 students attending are divided into different training programs. The 1st cycle takes 3 years and its graduates get a Diploma of Architectural Studies. The 2nd cycle is a two-year course that confers a State Diploma of Architecture (DEA), which is equivalent to a Master's degree. Graduates of the one-year HMONP (Habilitation à la Maîtrise d'Œuvre en son Nom propre) program can become certified project managers and legally sign and submit building permits. There are also 26 doctoral students – these graduates can become architects, researchers or teachers. And 19 students are in the Specialised Masters of sustainable development program. They tend to take civil service jobs or become policy makers.

According to most French academic rankings, the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville is the best of the 20 architecture schools in the country. It does not, however, figure on any rankings of the 200 best architecture schools in the world.² Of which there are far too many. Too many rankings, I mean. But also, too many architecture schools. Why are we producing so many architects? What will they and we do with all their training? Build? Build what?

New buildings: 59.8% Maintenance/rehabilitation: 20.6%

French architecture schools, unlike those elsewhere, are overseen by the Ministère de la Culture (Ministry of Culture), not by the Ministre de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche (Ministry of Higher Education and Research). This is a vestige of the centuries-old Beaux-Arts system, which champions architects-artistes, passionate, creative men at the helm, forging forward, driving their teams long into the night, devoted to self-transcendence and creative freedom and not giving a toss or having a clue about how much pain and suffering their rampant egotism causes their underlings, or how much a Phillips screw costs.

There were 30,225 architects and “agréés en architecture”³ registered with the Ordre des architectes in France at the beginning of 2022. Of these 32% were women (an increase of more than 16 percentage points between 2000 and 2021); 1,522 were new architects, having graduated in 2021; and around a third had their own practices and were self-employed.

Women accounted for 49.7% of architects under 35 years of age and half of all new registrants. In 2020, the average income of women architects was €33,495 euros. The average for men was €54,700. Salaries for new graduates, after a minimum of five years of study, is €1,400 to €1,900 a month. Very few of these new graduates obtain permanent work contracts (CDI) or ever get to “do architecture”. They do repetitive and sequenced tasks, most of it the work better-paid draughtsmen and draughtswomen used to do – “the systematic representation and dimensional specification of mechanical and architectural structures” – before that profession disappeared, replaced by “engineering tech.”

Endless digital drawings of doors and windows. That kind of thing.

Of those that graduated from French architectural schools in 2015, roughly one in five have changed careers. I know two who have become cooks.

Back to the workshops of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville. This is where students work but also where they eat and hang out. “Dwell” would have been Heidegger’s word for this. “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers.” Each student at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville is assigned a workshop at the beginning of the year. Some workshops, apparently, require the payment of a “masse” – a sum of money that allows you to use the workshop for six months. I think the money goes towards parties and kitchen supplies, but I have no idea, really. Nor, it seems, do the students – those I spoke to didn’t know whether the masse was obligatory.

The culture in these spaces is clannish and intense, intentionally, as a way to prepare students for French architecture’s famous culture de la charette. Cart culture. This is the term French architects use for the periods of intensive all-nighter work required to put together a blueprint and/or a maquette for a project. The term dates back to the 19th century, when architecture students rushed from their workshops carrying their architectural plans on wooden carts. Today it basically means all-nighters. Long exhausting days. Lots of coffee and other stimulants. Souffrir pour réussir – Suffering to succeed, that’s the motto. According to a 2018 survey published by UNEAP (national union of architecture and landscape students), 68% of students felt that, on a scale of one to ten, they were “under pressure” of seven or higher. Three quarters of these stated that the stress was detrimentally impacting their health.

The young people around me seem fairly healthy. They are quietly listening to We are the World while looking at books, computer screens, journals and Balance Ta Charrette (Ditch your cart”), an Instagram account started by a group of dissident students and, according to which, in 2020, the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville was ranked 11th out of 20 for “student well-being”.

The École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville has partnerships with 66 international universities, including La Sapienza in Rome and the University of Hong Kong. I have heard today whispered French, Spanish, English, Italian and Japanese. But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have not purchased earbuds, so I still hear the elevator singing, floor to floor, ee-ong to ee-ong. And it is not the singing of a sucked wooden pyrghy or a sheep-knuckle shagy. It is the song of the launeddas. A wind instrument found in Sardinia. A polyphonic clarinet with three pipes and a single reed that requires circle breathing. I kid you not. Not about the circle breathing, about the launeddas. And the elevator. The building, I have just discovered, during its refit, was set to music by Michel Aubry, a French sculptor and visual artist.

From his Wikipedia entry:

With Tapis afghans (Afghan rugs) reproducing war scenes, engraved metal shovels and military outfits with Sardinian musical instruments, accessories from the Fratellini dressing room to bullet-proof waistcoats made of Turkmen silk or wax, from Rodchenko's artist's suit to Albrecht Dürer's coat, via the figures of Le Corbusier or Erich von Stroheim, Michel Aubry activates a keyboard of eclectic motifs and unusual forms that he interprets as an insatiable and wise researcher. A rigorous repertoire that leads him to vary the mediums: Sardinian cane, bakelite, drawing, moulding, furniture. He makes films, notably Rodchenko in Paris.

And from the website of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville:

A series of pentagons on the ground forms a path from the Villette courtyard in the south to the Burnouf courtyard in the north, passing through the central hall and the garden. This layout, a spatial translation of the Sardinian music of the launeddas, allows the building to be set to music. Indeed, the pentagons visually translate the pentacords which correspond to the musical scales of five notes of the right and left hands of the instrument. Thirty-three sounds are embedded in the floor of the central hall forming twelve pentagons. The notes corresponding to the lengths of the pipes are obtained by placing reeds at the air inlets. The air ducts are marked with brass engravings, the reed locations and the air outlets are protected by bronze cases.

No mention of the elevator. But have a listen. And think of me, here, in the library of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville, surrounded by cart-pushers and mechanised circle-breathed pentachords. And thank you for reading all this way. And apologies to T.S. Eliot, whose Prufrock I pilfered above (I have not grown slightly bald), and whose The Waste Land was published 100 years ago today. Vive l'aléatoire!

1. Traditionally, évènement was spelled événement, with an acute (aigu) accent. However, since the RECTIFICATIONS DE L'ORTHOGRAPHE DE 1990 (the 1990 French spelling reform), the spelling "évènement" has been recommended by the Académie Française and is therefore accepted.

2. Three other French architecture schools figure on these international lists: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (ranked at 100), École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Malaquais (151), and Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne (also 151).

3. Professionals authorised by the State to be registered with the L'Ordre des architectes. They cannot use the title “architect”, but they have the same rights as architects and are subject to the same duties. If this makes any sense to you, you should move here, get registered, and hang out your shingle.