In the 1965 issue of Art in America, presenting the first version of Reyner Banham and François Dallegret “A Home Is Not a House”, a paragraph clearly acknowledged the double authorship of the illustrated essay. Despite such empathically stated double authorship, little attention has been devoted to Dallegret’s contribution that most iconically realizes the environmental tendencies present in American domestic architecture.
Dallegret’s vast photographic archive, still housed in his home in Montreal, witnesses the essential role of photography in the development of his oeuvre: photographs as traces of works in progress or finished products, snapshots as memories of encounters and events, and images as the basis for photomontages. Many of them were taken in a studio by professional photographers who specialised in portraying works of art. Two such photographers were Shunk and Kender, the same photographers hired by Yves Klein in October 1960 for his Saut dans le Vide. Like Klein, captured while jumping into space from an elevated garden wall, François Dallegret performs in front of the camera. The resulting images become an essential component of the work, as the photographs of his naked body montaged into the “environmental bubble”.
Alessandra Ponte is full professor at the École d’architecture, Université de Montréal. She has taught history and theory of architecture and landscape at Pratt Institute (New York), Princeton University, Cornell University, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, and ETH (Zurich). She has written articles and essays in numerous international publications, published a volume on Richard Payne Knight and the Eighteenth century Picturesque (Paris, 2000) and co-edited, with Antoine Picon, a collection of papers on architecture and the sciences (New York 2003). For the last four year she is been responsible for the conception and organization of the Phyllis Lambert Seminar, a series colloquia on contemporary architectural topics. She organized the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975 (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2009) and recently collaborated to the exhibition and co-edited the catalogue of God &Co: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (London: Architectural Association, 2011). She is currently completing a series of investigations on North American landscapes for her forthcoming book Maps and Territories (London, 2012).
The lecture series 2011/2012 addresses the question: Is there architecture history after Foucault? The IKA invites historians, scientists and architecture theorists from various fields and disciplines to discuss more fundamental issues of the practices of a historian which are diversely effected by the major impact of Michel Foucault’s writings. However, the main focus of the lectures is rather generally on methodo-logical approaches of subsequent historical research and knowledge. The lectures will help to redefine architecture history’s position today.