This article condenses arguments and analysis from several lectures given from 2018- 2020, as well as previously-published texts: Meredith TenHoor, “State-Funded Militant Infrastructure? CERFI’s Équipements Collectifs in the Intellectual History of Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture 24, no. 7 (October 3, 2019): 999–1019; Meredith TenHoor, “Des architectures du soin: Philippe Paumelle et Nicole Sonolet,” Terrain 76 (Spring 2022); Meredith TenHoor, “Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25, no. 2 (2007): 73–92. I am grateful to the editors of these publications for permission to summarize them here, and to Christine de Bremond d’Ars, for sharing her insights and Sonolet’s archives with me.
For more on the theories and politics of IP, see Valentin Schaepelynck, L’institution renversée: Folie, analyse institutionnelle et champ social (Paris: Eterotopia, 2018), and Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
For more detail on the design of L’Eau Vive, see Meredith TenHoor, “The Design of Community Mental Health Care: Nicole Sonolet in Postwar France,” gta papers 7 (Zurich: gta Verlag 2022), and Julie Mareuil, “Une clinique-pilote de la sectorisation psychiatrique: L’hôpital de l’Eau Vive et son évolution de 1959 à 1977” (MA Thesis, ENSA Paris-La Villette, 2020).
Nicole Sonolet, “Un centre de santé mentale. Point de vue et proposition d’un architecte,” Information Psychiatrique 6 (June 1966): 527–532; Nicole Sonolet, “An Urban Mental Health Center: Proposal for an Experimental Design,” Social Psychiatry 2, no. 3 (1967): 137–143.
CERFI, “Programmation, Architecture et Psychiatrie,” Recherches 6 (1967).
Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira offer a helpful analysis of this issue of Recherches, focusing on how CERFI modified ideas about mental health and its place in urban design and planning in France. See Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira, “CERFI: From the Hospital to the City,” London Journal of Critical Theory 1, no. 2 (May 2017): 83–100.
Nicole Sonolet, “Un centre de santé mentale urbain: proposition d’une experience,” Recherches 6 (1967).
CERFI’s work on this topic caught the attention of the landscape historian Michel Conan, who was in charge of urban research at the Ministry of Public Works. Conan arranged funding for CERFI to undertake projects to plan mental health facilities in the New Towns of Évry and Melun-Sénart. For more detail, see TenHoor, “State-Funded Militant Infrastructure?”
CERFI had to submit official reports of the work completed for their various research contracts, and did so in this case by publishing a small booklet: CERFI, “La programmation des équipements collectifs dans les villes nouvelles (Les équipements d’hygiène mentale): Rapport sur l’exécution de la convention d’études entre le CERFI et le Ministère d’équipement et du logement (Direction de l’aménagement foncier et de l’urbanisme) du 4 mai 1971” (Paris: Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionnelles, 1972).
Michel Foucault, ed., Les Machines à guérir: aux origines de l’hôpital moderne, (Paris: Institut de l’environnement, 1976). Foucault’s essay has been translated in English as Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century.” In: Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). A translation of the entire text, edited and introduced by Anne Kockelkorn and Moritz Gleich, is forthcoming, and eagerly anticipated.
Bruno Fortier, “Architecture de l’hôpital.” In: Les machines à guérir : aux origines de l’hôpital moderne (Paris: L’institut de l’environnement, 1976).
Ibid., 72.
This is equally true of Foucault’s theories of biopolitics which miss many of the most crucial sites of eighteenth century biopolitical formation, particularly those of extractive economies and enslavement, as Alexander Wehilye, Simone Brown, and many others have documented. See Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). However, CERFI’s and Sonolet’s resistance to theories of machinic governance aligned with their anti-colonial stances more generally.
Sonolet collaborated with architect Maria Baran on the project; later they were joined by Olek Kujawski and Tristan Darros who oversaw construction. Permits for the project were approved in 1972, but because of funding and other challenges, it took nearly nine years for the project to be completed.