At first glance, Marc Angélil is not a man who stands out. With his slim build, mostly black attire and discreet Junghans watch, he cuts a rather purist figure. Sometimes you might see a blot of ink on his forearm – traces of his black fountain pen, which goes with him everywhere and which he likes to use to explain his thoughts to whoever he’s speaking to in simple sketches during meetings. What does stand out is the restless, radiant and engaging look that comes over Angélil when he begins to talk about his work as an ETH professor, widely travelled researcher and distinguished architect. His curiosity about the world seems unbroken even at the age of 65. As a ten-year-old, he would already spend entire days reading in his grandfather’s library in Alexandria, where he grew up. To this day, he reserves one hour of his generally long working day for reading. Even more of his time is devoted to writing: since graduating from ETH Zurich 40 years ago, he has written hundreds of essays and several books on topics related to architecture, urbanisation and urban planning. Driven by the urge to fathom and understand the dynamics of urbanisation on the ground, he has worked his way through Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Addis Ababa, Shanghai, Mumbai, Paris and Zurich.
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The American
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We meet for the interview near Zurich’s Letzigrund stadium in the bright, open-plan office of agps, the architecture practice Angélil set up in 1982 with
Manuel Scholl
and his partner, Californian architect Sarah Graham. She was also the one who encouraged him to move to the United States back then, having battled her way through several Swiss winters. After a teaching assignment at Harvard University near Boston, Angélil moved to Los Angeles, where he spent seven years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “It was my experiences in Los Angeles that brought me to urbanisation as a research topic,” he explains. His fascination for the metropolis, its heterogeneity and contradictions, coupled with the postmodern discourse of the 1980s at the university, changed his relationship with architecture forever. He returned to his
alma mater
as an assistant professor in 1994. “You don’t find comparable conditions as a professor anywhere else,” he explains. But things were tough for him in Zurich at the beginning. His colleagues in the department just called him “the American”. This had nothing to do with Angélil’s accent. It was his perspective on architecture. He began to get interested in agglomerations, outskirts, urban infrastructures, socio-spatial relations and global urbanisation processes. Topics that were, at that time, not yet considered the core competencies of architecture in the strict sense.
This broader view of city and architecture, coupled with the social, political and economic drivers of global urbanisation, were to shape Angélil’s research and teaching from then on; the “political economy” of construction became his guiding concept on the theoretical front. “What are the forces that are actually driving construction today?” he asks rhetorically. “It’s capital! The economy has become the be-all and end-all of architecture.” Yet this is something that has so far been underrepresented in architecture studies. Economic developments, such as the global financial crisis from 2007 onward, are radically changing life in urban centres today – with a speed and brutality that often leaves traditional urban planning in the dust. This also raises new questions about the relationship between formal and informal construction, especially in the global south, a recurrent theme in Angélil’s work.
Undying plans
In developing an MAS in Urban Design, Angélil took the new challenges facing architects and urban planners and translated them into a teaching context. The result is a transdisciplinary degree programme with a global dimension. At its heart is a studio where students conduct their own field research in a specific urban context. The construction of social housing is one example. Here, a group looked for possible ways of including informal construction activities in official government programmes. Based on an in-depth analysis, the group supported co-operation between social housing activists, housing co-operatives and the authorities. Eventually, the department was commissioned by the responsible authority to build 500 housing units using the construction kit that had been specially developed for inclusive and sustainable social construction. But in the end the project failed because of a harsh reality in Brazil: the land allocated for the plans became embroiled in a corruption scandal. Despite his disappointment, Angélil remains convinced: “Our plans and recommendations have been published, they live on.”
Several studios have been working on projects concerning Angélil's country of origin, Egypt, because he is both fascinated and shocked by the upheavals there. “Today, popular districts in Cairo, where more than ten million people live, no longer appear on any official map. These people do not exist as far as the state is concerned.” Elsewhere along the Nile, the city is eating its way into arable land and thus endangering the food supply for the population. At the same time, El-Sisi’s government is building brand new cities with luxury hotels and shopping malls in the desert with the help of international investors and Chinese developers. Angélil’s book “Housing Cairo”, published in 2016, bears witness to the fact that architecture and urban planning are always political. On his way to Cairo with a few copies in his luggage, Angélil was stopped by the authorities and the book confiscated on the grounds that it contained plans of informal settlements that did not officially exist. The book is now out of print. “It became a best-seller overnight because of the ban,” Angélil recalls, laughing mischievously.
His latest, almost 1,000-page book, “Mirroring Effects. Tales of Territory”
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, is a collection of ten great stories about recent urban developments – including accounts from Egypt and Brazil. He spent ten years working on this opus magnum with his research assistant Cary Siress. “Many of the tales read like horror stories about how man transforms his territory and recreates the earth,” says Angélil, “only they’re not fairy tales.”
