Pierre Chabard: Utilitas, Firmitas, Austeritas

Text: Márk Váncza

The subject of this review was published in one of the highest standard and formative journal of architectural theory today titled Log Magazine, which was founded by Cynthia Davidson, in a thematic issue focusing on geometry (Log Magazine No. 43, 2018 Summer). The author, Pierre Chabard French architect and theoretician, is also the founder and editor of Criticat, a journal of theory. After the economic crisis in 2008, new aesthetic and moral principles came to the foreground and thus gained significance in the architectural discourses which the study also refers to in its title. Replacing the last concept of the Vitruvian trio (firmitas, utilitas, venustas) with the word austeritas, the writer of the article refers to the fact that l’art pour l’art beauty has been pushed behind to modesty by now. As of today, the most recognized professionals of architecture are not the stars, but the minor architects’ teams working in the spirit and ethos of constructing less. Simplicity and modesty, however, have turned into stylistic approaches, emptying the original meaning of the concept, and thus also narrowing down the variety of professional formal tools. In the most interesting part of his study, Chabard surveys the present-day potentials and possibilities of architects. He examines two trends in this: the activist tendency, in which an architect is present as a supporter of aid culture fed by the guilt and remorse of developed countries, and pursues a kind of social, environmentally aware architecture under the aegis of global responsibility. The other trend is represented by autonomous architecture, which is a kind of exile and retirement in order to map and survey the internal laws and principles of the profession and their radical reinterpretation.