MAURICE BRAILLARD – VERTICALES URBAINES
Directed by: Aurélie Doutre
Narration: Paul Marti, historian
Production: Braillard Architects Foundation
The European Heritage Days in 2020 gave rise to an original initiative: the presentation, on the premises of the Braillard Architects Foundation, of an exhibition dedicated to the unbuilt towers of Maurice Braillard. Today, the Foundation has the privilege of publishing online the 27-minute film by Aurélie Doutre that perpetuates its memory.
Narrated by the historian Paul Marti, the urban planner’s drawings and sketches come to life and allow us to immerse ourselves in a Greater Geneva as it was dreamed of almost a century ago.
This selection of suggestive documents, plans, and above all perspectives in pencil, pen or charcoal drawn from the Braillard archives testifies to futuristic, not to say utopian, urban visions. It reflects urbanistic but also technical, social and aesthetic debates; more broadly, it evokes the political and economic context of the interwar period.
More specifically, the tower projects for Cornavin station (1924 and 1926), Les Terreaux-du-Temple (1928), the Montchoisy squares (1926-1929), the Moillebeau district (1927) and the Right Bank (1928-1931) bear witness to an original research process in constant renewal. In Braillard’s work, the quest for the modern city – rational, functional, hygienic – is enriched by a particular attention to urban spaces and to the conditions of their appropriation by the inhabitants. The quest for a metropolitan urbanity seems to guide his approach as a designer. These great projects can thus be read like cinematographic sequence shots: they are veritable urban scenographies unfolding in a form of temporal continuity, in the image of pedestrian flows and, even more, of the linear movement of modern transport (cars, buses, trams) omnipresent in the drawings.
Above all, the exhibition and the films are an invitation to the contemporary actors of the city. They are a call to confront today’s challenges – those inherent to the ecological transition and to the sustainable development of the Greater Geneva – with the same confidence and insight, but also science and creative strength.