On the first visit, it takes a moment to find meaning in these buildings, in the city center of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne). A stack of raw concrete stars with aggressive points, but facades dripping with Virginia creeper and a succession of hanging gardens. On the terrace of his apartment, a shirtless man trims his shrubs. He stops to admire his work, shears in hand, indifferent to the noise of the cars circulating on the avenue, 10 meters below. On another terrace, his neighbors have hung a hammock. Elsewhere, we spot rose bushes, vegetable gardens and even, an exotic vision on a balcony, a pine tree almost 2 meters high. No two terraces are the same, no two apartments either.
When he imagined the Jeanne-Hachette center, the architect Jean Renaudie (1925-1981), drew forty different plans, one for each accommodation, with one constant, nevertheless: in each living room, an acute angle, like the point of a star, creates a surprise. Jean Renaudie imagined concrete ramps and stairs, at all levels, in all directions, to circulate from one end of the complex to the other by varying the routes. On the lower floors, he finally designed a shopping center, and designed its aisles, designated by the pretty name of “walks”like streets open day and night to the city.
Architects from around the world and Instagram fans of urban planning know these buildings, built between 1970 and 1975, – the Jeanne-Hachette center and its neighbors built later in a similar style – under their nickname, “the Stars of Renaudie “. Those whose job it is to identify filming locations for cinema, too. In 2014, Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence came to film in this tangle of concrete a few scenes from the last part of Hunger Games, the dystopian saga then popular with adolescents. Omar Sy lived in one of the apartments in the film The other side of the ring-road, released in 2012, then in its sequel, Far from the ring road, produced for Netflix ten years later. Ivryans know that what the cinema shows does not always correspond to reality.
Abandoned storefronts
The urban ensemble is one of the jewels of the architecture of the “thirty glorious years” in Île-de-France. Like the Tours Nuage in Nanterre or the Choux de Créteil, “les Etoiles de Renaudie” are the testimony of a period when working-class housing was particularly ambitious, supported by architects and politicians who dreamed of changing everyday life. A vision of urban planning whose images and relics the era loves. But the reality is not very happy.
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