« L’Affaire du Trocadéro » : dialogue(s) autour d’une architecture promise à la disparition (1933-1937)

Abstract

In the autumn of 1933, Auguste Perret, for the Exhibition of 1937, proposed not to demolish Davioud and Bourdais’ Trocadéro palace. This proposal aroused a debate in the French press. The art critic Charles Kunstler wondered about the future of the palace, whilst the journal L’Art vivant collected the opinions of the ‘influential figures’ of Paris in favour of the demolition of the monument, considered to be the ugliest of the city. The survey, published in 1934, gathered thirty accounts of architects, museum people, writers and artists including Emmanuel Sougez, photographer and director of the photographic department of L’Illustration. He expressed his sadness at the demolition of the monument and decided to photograph it in order to preserve its memory. A dialogue arose from this ultimate meeting between Sougez and architecture and bears witness to the ambivalence of the society which, in the name of its aesthetic judgements, removes what it considers ugly and, immediately after, regrets what it has just condemned. If the initiative of L’Art vivant shows something of the tensions which contributed to the Trocadéro’s demolition, Sougez’s initiatives participated, in the work he has done, in the discovery of a new Trocadéro, built by the nineteenth-century architects, Davioud and Bourdais, and destroyed by the twentieth century.

Keywords

• architecture
• Trocadéro
• photography
• Gabriel Davioud
• Jules Bourdais
• Colline de Chaillot