TABULA RASA TEMPTATION
Year: 2022
Location: Culturgest Culture Centre, Lisbon
Client: Lisbon Architecture Triennale Terra
Co-curated with the architect and Professor at the Potsdam School of Architecture, Anupama Kundoo.
An innocent idea that you can correct and redeem all past mistakes by starting anew and building – on a tabula rasa in the middle of nowhere – an entirely different life structure was and still is a powerful engine for visionary designs.
Forget about everything, find a plot of land far far away, gather the right people, and realise your vision. This is an invitation that, should an opportunity present itself, most architects would take on with enthusiasm. Even if they know from history that things can go terribly wrong.
At the zenith of his professional career, the French modernist Roger Anger (1923 – 2008) moved from Paris to India.
Almost forgotten today, then in the late 1960s, he was as famous as Le Corbusier and much more commercially successful. He left his fashionable lifestyle, his lucrative commissions and the office of 100 people behind to dedicate the rest of his life to just one project: a futuristic settlement called Auroville.
Roger Anger dreamed about designing a prototypical universal city that will be replicated around the globe.
The ambition was to open a lab for architecture and urbanism, where by trial and error to develop a collection of model elements with which any productive community can build a harmonious homeplace.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Roger Anger was not a colonial conqueror. An exotic location simply offered freedom from existing norms and stereotypes. The clients – an international community of followers of the Yoga guru and philosopher Sri Aurobindo led by Mira Alfassa – were there to experiment with their own lives and never imposed any strict protocols on the architect.
His brief was a simple diagram and a short description of future Auroville: “the city that the Earth needs”.
In this mini-exhibition we just begin to rediscover the fifty-year long process of the project realisation from a vantage point in 2022 and with Roger Anger’s Centenary in mind. Recently the Auroville Foundation under the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development appointed a disciple and collaborator of Roger Anger, the female architect Anupama Kundoo as the new head of urban design at the planning office called Auroville Town Development Council.
Anger turned Auroville into his own architectural laboratory. Aspiring to build the city that the Earth needs, he designed a collection of brutalist model structures, derived from his Parisian experience, yet entirely different from the International Style of that period.
His approach to design was well ahead of its time. Many technical solutions were tested on the construction site by the community members and villagers. The team built with local materials, devised smart ventilation systems, collected rainwater, experimented with natural light and created microclimates. Although a lot of these experiments failed, Anger understood the drive of learning from nature and consistently worked towards a functional urban ecosystem.
Special thank you to: Jacqueline Lacoste, Roger Anger’s partner in life and work, Auroville Foundation
Some of the exhibits on display are shown for the first time.
Photo: Nuno Cera, Sara Constanza
Visionaries Lisbon Triennale