Jeanne Quéheillard: When did you first encounter the Institut of Environment?

Monique Eleb: It was by chance that I came to the Institut of Environment. I was a psychologist and was doing my training in psychoanalysis. I was looking for a summer job and an assistant professor at the university proposed that I finish a bibliography on the relationship between the human sciences and architecture, which had gotten bogged down. I worked all summer and it was fun for me. I must say that I was familiar with the milieu of architecture because of my friends and family. People often questioned me about psychoanalysis, the perception of space, gestalt theory, etc. I discovered that I had a passion for research. In fact, I found myself in an incredible milieu, a sort of utopia, in which it was thought that multidisciplinary teaching was going to make ways of thinking evolve. The events of 1968 were recent. In July 1969, I was arriving in an institution which was just getting off the ground but had already had teaching experience. It was an establishment of higher education that recruited graduates and promoted the idea of research. The people who were recruited were older students, who in certain cases were ten or fifteen years older than I was. There were architects, artists, designers, geographers, economists, mathematicians, city planners, architecture historians, etc., a very wide multidisciplinary selection that was made up of personalities, all teachers. The students of the Institute were exacting adults who figured they were going to have one more diploma, which would be useful and increase their standing, and that they were all going to be trained together.

JQ: How did the Institut de l’Environment work?

ME: The Minister of culture, André Malraux, was the silent partner. Robert Joly and Jean Prouvé had constructed the building. Numerous project managers for the arts including Florence Contenay and Alexandre Bonnier had worked on the global development. In the beginning, the idea was to teach and to see how research was gradually going to establish itself in fields in which it hadn’t been set up yet, like architecture. When I arrived, I was in the only office that had Centre de recherche written on the door. In fact, it was in Human Sciences. Doing this bibliography — the research and then seminars on the theme of “Human sciences and architecture” had been fundamental because it opened the way for propositions, in particular for architecture schools, whereas all of the teaching methods had been called into question in the Beaux-arts schools well before May ’68.

The pedagogical director was Claude Schnaidt, an architect and architecture historian, who had come back from Ulm with all of the teaching ideals of the Bauhaus and an immense knowledge of architecture. I interviewed him at the time and was dazzled. He developed the style of the Institute: the logo, the graphic identity, the choice of furniture. There was an aesthetic that was impossible to transform. If somebody asked the secretaries to do something special, they had to ask Claude Schnaidt for his permission and were watched very closely! The “aesthetic control” was incredible.

Amongst the teachers, there was also the sociologist Antoine Haumont and Jacques Allégret, the city planner who had been one of the creators of the AUA (l’Atelier d’architecture et d’urbanisme), a multidisciplinary agency. I was a young researcher who had just arrived. I stayed until 1975 when the Institute was moved to Nanterre. My director was Christian Gaillard, a Jungian psychoanalyst who was interested in art and later taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1972 the center was rounded out with the addition of architect Philippe Nick, who worked on the training and profession of architects, then the economist Thérèse Evette, and Bernard Haumont, the socio-urban planner.

JQ: What were the principal characteristics of the Institut of Environment?

ME: It was a place for debate, teaching and introducing research. But above all there was an ambiance there in which one’s competence in one field was associated with the perspective one had of others’ fields. It was the idea that others were going to teach you things that you didn’t know and that they were going to nourish and help you develop your own specialty. Yet there were rumblings at the teaching level. On the inside the students protested and were demanding while they displayed a certain disappointment, and then there was the political opposition between the teachers, who were often communist and the students who were often left-wing. On the outside, there was a lot of jealousy. The Minister for culture had invested means. The schools considered the money to have been taken from their budget in order to train an elite. The students gave the impression of being the chosen ones and were pampered even as they rebelled against the hierarchy. There were rumblings all the time. After two and a half years the Minister decided to terminate the teaching program.

The Institut of Environment was an intellectual melting pot, a crucible of exchanges and social and intellectual claims, where there was a desire to test new ideas in order to change society. There was a cafeteria and a terrace where people came every morning to talk. I even met Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes there. We had the idea, like the students of the schools that frequented the Institute, that the possibility of constructing an avant-garde way of thinking, with serious interrogations of methods, was possible there. It was a melting pot for multidisciplinary research.

The mathematician Jean Zeitoun had a computer installed that took up a whole office — one of the first ones we had ever seen.

JQ: What were the Institut of Environment’s activities?

ME: Apart from teaching, the activities were concentrated around the documentation center and the setting up of research. However, architectural research very quickly took priority. The architecture schools made strong claims regarding theory in 1968. In 1970 the Ministère de la Culture had entrusted Professeur Lichnerowicz with building a reflection on architectural research. The ministry had established a commission, and then created a committee for architectural research, and put it in charge of its activities in the schools. In 1972 the Comité de la recherche et du développement en architecture (CORDA) was created and a Secrétariat de la recherche architecturale (SRA) was established at the Direction de l’architecture. The first heads of missions of the SRA, Claude Soucy, Pierre Molins and Jean-Paul Lesterlin defined the themes and launched a first call for projects. The latter put three people in charge of a research study on teaching in other countries. They were installed in the Institute toward 1972, I think. Jean-Louis Cohen (Europe and the East), Pierre Clément (Asia), David Elalouf (America) started to work with Lesterlin on establishing architectural research within the Institute. Meanwhile, Alexandre Bonnier, mission director for art took care of this aspect. There were quite a few students who came from art schools. Most of the participating staff had other activities outside of the Institute. They produced pedagogical documents. And there was an integrated printing works. It was great. When I did this first bibliography, everybody thought that the Institute had loads of means because it published printed works.

Pierre Clément, the architect, was put in charge of the Centre de documentation, which played a very important role. Each of the authorities of the Institute provided a set of issues for building up the library. The archivists got information on everything that came out and had put into place all the fundamental documentation for each specialty. It was extraordinary; this center nourished us. For 6 years I was able to read and have everything that seemed necessary for feeding the research on the two themes of the Centre of research in human sciences bought.

And then there were the seminars, conferences and exhibitions. I personally organized, with Christian Gaillard, a first seminar in 1972, Sciences humaines et architecture. Questions d’enseignement, that brought together the Human sciences teachers of the French architecture schools, then in 1973, Espace des sciences humaines, questions d’enseignement en architecture, which were each the subjects of a publication. At the close of this meeting, we put study and research groups into place in economy, sociology, geography, psychology and history. These groups met over the years to think about teaching, and the way research could nourish teaching. How could one be a sociologist in an architecture school? and so on. I called upon teachers from architecture schools and each group chose its organizer. (There were Bernard Haumont, Philippe Nick, Thérèse Evette, Suzanne Paré, Claude Prelorenzo, Jean-Charles Depaule, etc.). In this way a milieu was created. In 1972, I published the first Cahier Pédagogique of the IE on Psychologie et espace with articles of teachers from the schools. Then there were others and in particular, an issue by the group of architecture historians around Bruno Fortier.

We didn’t use the word “architecture” but rather the word “space” in order not to be limited to only one discipline. Space and environment enabled us to integrate lots of other concepts from different disciplines. With the École des Arts déco next door, the artists came for the conferences, exhibitions or to the cafeteria. But it’s architecture that made use of this tool. I’m not sure that the other specialties of the Institute were as dynamic. Maybe they didn’t need the Institut of Environment. I remember that the first PAN (Programme Architecture Nouvelle), created in connection with the Ministère de la Culture and the Ministère de l’Equipement, was exhibited there. The PAN was one of the prestigious venues for the recognition of young architects. It put Portzamparc, Yves Lion on the scene... In fact, the artists and designers didn’t grasp the question as intensely as the architects. I nevertheless remember having had meetings with different members of the Ministère de la Culture, around 1974 on boulevard Sébastopol in an apartment, with the aim of recreating an Institute where the arts and design would have more importance and would be more dynamic.

The line of descent continued through architecture. When the Institut was transformed in 1976, the researchers in architecture first went to Nanterre, then built up the CERA (Centre d’Etudes de Recherche Architecturale, rue Jacques Callot) which then became the IFA (Institut Français d’Architecture, rue de Tournon).

JQ: Why the word environment?

ME: The word environment was a portmanteau word. The expression cadre de vie was very popular. Environment made it possible to talk about everything that contributed to urban planning and urbanity, living in town but not only that — it made it possible to talk about the city, the landscape, and the habitat. The word environment translated everything that contributed to our everyday lives: the buildings, the ambience, art... The environment was all the disciplines that converged to construct the built structure. They were phrases that we repeated all the time.

One day Antoine Haumont or Claude Schnaidt, I can’t remember which any more, decided to invite a “friend,” a specialist on the environment such as we conceive of it today, a physicist or a chemist who talked about ecology. In the hall there were protestations, because for us, the environment wasn’t that, it was everything around us, not just ecology. There was a certain resistance to thinking along the lines of the hard sciences, like physics, chemistry, etc. We thought that was simplistic, whereas today, it can be said that that has broadened the debate. We wanted to approach the question through the human sciences, to put man in the center. It was about developing multidisciplinarity starting with the human sciences, including mathematics as one of them. The students read Gilbert Simondon. We were very concentrated on innovation. In 1968, the idea of changing the world was what motivated us; that is, to seize everything that enabled us to evolve.

JQ: Lastly, how would you define the nature and goal of this utopia?

ME: When the Institut opened, the demands of the students were about knowledge. The architecture teaching in the art schools had become abominable because the transmission was essentially done from former students to new ones, through the example of the knowledge of masters; there was little or no theoretical teaching. The schools had just been restructured, and had put an active multidisciplinarity in place. They re-intellectualized themselves. The workshops, transformed into pedagogical units, were already installed outside like those of Candilis or Bernard Huet. I laughed a lot when I found an old text by Frantz Jourdain. He evoked with humour the extravagant and unrealistic project themes in a Beaux-Arts workshop around 1890, L’atelier Chantorel. In 1968, the students’ reproaches were about the same thing: the teachers taught by way of savoir faire, with injustices in the competitive entrance exams, special privileges. The students complained that they were not nourished. The Institut of Environment was supposed to make up for a whole generation’s shortcomings. It had been made to “teach the teachers” and make them more competent, the proof of this being the many debates on teaching methods. The goal was to theorize the practice. The question was: what theoretical contribution will be necessary in order for this practice to evolve and become something other than a simple formal imitation, unconnected to the social reality?

The Institut of Environment was a magnificent utopia that integrated art, architecture, multidisciplinarity and research. For all of those who were part of it, it remains nostalgic. Not all of the paths have been explored. But for architecture, the Institute was the center of a dynamic that helped to build up research. The goal of the ministère was to teach teachers and researchers in order to re-dynamize a milieu that had lost its direction. The Institute was this venue for a few years and with the Cité de Chaillot we might have been able to believe, for a too brief moment, that the intellectual melting pot would be able to find itself back again.