French-American interrelationships in the areas of design and creative thinking have been under-acknowledged. It is normally asserted that French architects looked to North America for technical lessons in the development of modern architecture in the 1960s but that the French cultural environment was generally hostile to American ideas. This book includes interviews with French architects who visited the United States in the 1960s-1970s and then assumed influential positions in the press and education in France. Some of these architects found in non-mainstream America and its radical groups of architectural drop-outs a liberating force, free of the taint of American capitalism and the high-investment technology. Often living in alternative student communities, they saw highly innovative, low-cost technical and structural systems placed in the service of collective forms of living which represented a critique not only of professional architectural practice but also of bourgeois forms of living. Many of them also studied in American schools of architecture and came in contact with an intellectual and interdisciplinary style of architectural education unavailable in France at that time.
Including interviews with French architects who visited the States in the 1960s and then assumed influential positions in the press and education in France, this book shows how they actually found in the American counterculture and its radical groups of architectural dropouts a liberating force, free of the taint of American capitalism.
'A marvelous cross-cultural trip, Caroline Maniaque-Benton's new book authoritatively traces the quixotic excursions of the American counterculture into "alternative architecture" from the transatlantic perspective of France. Based on interviews with many of the protagonists and vividly illustrated, the author explores the juncture of do-it-yourself aesthetics, radical politics, and ecological consciousness. The book is all the more timely at a moment when the nascent environmentalism of the 1960s is coming to full fruition around the world.' Joan Ockman, Columbia University, USA 'The book also constitutes a remarkable visual document, as Maniaque-Benton has managed to gather photos from personal albums, as well as bits of ephemera the survival of which is nothing short of miraculous. Covers and illustrations from obscure journals such as La face cachée du soleil, and Icosa are beautifully reproduced in French Encounters... Maniaque-Benton convincingly sets up the encounter between French and American experimental architecture as a prelude to the contemporary scene, offering much historical and ideological material on which to meditate in assessing the mandate of 'sustainable design'.' H-France 'Maniaque-Benton's careful primary research (she visited many iconic sites and interviewed key American protagonists, such as Steve Baer), her command of the most current cultural and architectural scholarship on the counterculture and her lively prose combine to make this book a significant contribution to the scholarship of American counterculture and alternative architecture. The numerous accompanying images are superb, and include travel photographs imbued with a wonderful immediacy and energy, beautifully reproduced magazine covers, and views of exhibition displays.' Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
