The Journal of Architecture

ISSN: 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s

équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of
architecture

Meredith TenHoor

To cite this article: Meredith TenHoor (2019) State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements�collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture, The Journal of Architecture, 24:7,
999-1019, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2019.1698638

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1698638

Published online: 24 Dec 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 65

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjar20
 999 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

State-funded militant infrastructure?

CERFI’s équipements collectifs in the
intellectual history of architecture

‘Militant’ research that interrogates the operations of the modern state Meredith TenHoor
is not often state-funded; even less common is the conception of archi-
tecture as a militant practice. Yet these two conditions coincide in the School of Architecture, Pratt Institute
case of the French research collective CERFI (Centre d’études, de New York, USA
recherches et de formations institutionelles, or Centre for Institutional mtenhoor@pratt.edu
Studies, Research and Training). Starting in 1967, CERFI directed state
funding toward research carried out by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists,
architects, urbanists, historians, care workers, activists and sociologists.
These researchers developed theories and practices of what they called
‘équipements collectifs’, a form of physical and social infrastructure
that served needs the state had not identified or prioritised. This
concept of infrastructure helped CERFI to obtain research contracts
from the French Ministry of Equipment, which in turn allowed them to
develop interdisciplinary, collaborative and participatory models for con-
ceptualising and designing infrastructure which would have otherwise
been impossible. At a moment like this one, when infrastructure
studies take a more prominent role in the discipline of architecture,
and where programming decisions are often driven more by data than
by deliberation, CERFI’s theories are important to revisit.

In 1971, an apartment in a stately Haussmannian building in Paris owned by the

multimillionaire aviation magnate, real-estate investor and architectural patron
Marcel Dassault became the centre of operations for a research institute called
CERFI (the Centre d’études, de recherches et de formations institutionnelles, or
the Centre for Institutional Studies, Research and Training) (Fig. 1).1 CERFI was
the regular recipient of research funds from the French state, and its anodyne
acronym, typical of many post-war French research institutions, made it
appear that the organisation belonged in Dassault’s world. But out of this
office emanated radical theses and praxis about architecture, infrastructure, col-
lectivity and the state that could not be more opposed to the privatising logic of
the Groupe Dassault.2 CERFI depended on the architectural and financial foun-
dations of the French state, but it sought to remake its operations from within.
Its manner of doing this, and the importance of CERFI’s work for the intellectual
history of architecture, are the subjects of this paper.
CERFI was founded in 1967 by the radical philosopher-psychoanalyst Félix
Guattari, and the group shared its work through a journal called Recherches,
or Research, published from 1966 to 1983 (Fig. 2). CERFI and Recherches
staked out a rich intellectual terrain, considering French education, sexuality,

# 2019 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1698638

 1000 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

Figure 1.
103 boulevard Beaumarchais,
offices of CERFI in 1971, as
photographed in 2019 by James
Graham

medical care, labour cultures, housing, planning and social life. While CERFI is
often linked to Guattari and his psychoanalytic and philosophical project, it
was actually a group of researchers who had a wide variety of perspectives,
training and disciplinary orientations. The CERFIstes shared a desire to reform
the instruments of the French state via new combinations of institutional, his-
torical, sociological and psycho-analysis, as well as through philosophy, critique,
conversation, and design.
While the sum of CERFI’s fascinating work is worthy of consideration, I will
here focus on that most relevant to architectural discourse: research, theoris-
ation and practice about équipements collectifs, which can be translated as col-
lective amenities, facilities, or infrastructures. (To preserve the many meanings of
 1001 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

this term I’ve chosen to leave it untranslated in this text.) Work on équipements Figure 2.
collectifs by participants in CERFI projects Nicole Sonolet, Alain Schmied, Anne Covers of Recherches from 1967 to
1973. Issues discussed in this text
Querrien, Francois Fourquet, Lion Murard, Félix Guattari, Bruno Fortier, and
are enclosed in red boxes. Images
Michel Foucault generated new definitions of architectural terms such as typol- courtesy of Reveue Recherches,
ogy, development, infrastructure and programme, and yielded now-familiar http://www.editions-recherches.
philosophical terms such as biopolitics. In our present moment, when theories com/revue3.php
of infrastructure proliferate inside and outside of the discipline of architecture,
it is worthwhile to return to CERFI’s ideas about équipements collectifs, to the
ideas about architecture they borrowed and transformed, and to the particular
institutional configurations and funding sources that enabled this work.
Because CERFI was an organisation that involved so many different people, it
is difficult to speak of it as a single entity with a unified intellectual agenda.
There were common interests and politics, but ideas shifted over time and
depended on who was authoring them. CERFI’s heterogeneity also poses
research challenges: the group has no single archive, so even this partial
attempt to re-compose its work has involved finding and reading CERFI’s
research reports; reading articles they published in Recherches; interviewing
Anne Querrien, one of its key members, about its history; finding and analysing
the archives of the architect Nicole Sonolet, and drawing on the work of other
scholars. Nonetheless, it is possible to roughly summarise CERFI’s key theses
about équipements collectifs in order to make clear how their definitions
might contribute to an enriched understanding of infrastructure:3
1002 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

. Infrastructures of all kinds can be considered to be équipements collectifs and

équipements collectifs encompass social services and practices of care, as well
as physical things.
. Infrastructure and équipements collectifs cannot be planned via analyses of
biopolitical statistics, but instead, plans for them must emerge out of conver-
sation and discussion that take into account desire, and also libido. This desire
and need are in a feedback loop with the design of équipements collectifs.
The techniques of (post-Lacanian, Guattarian) psychoanalysis and the insights
of institutional psychotherapy are necessary to think about the relationship
between infrastructure, desire, and need.
. Expertise is required to design équipements collectifs, but expertise is not in
the hands of state planners alone: it comes from people from many disci-
plines, and from many social positions in relationship to the facilities pro-
posed. As such, new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration — primarily
organised through conversation — are necessary to design équipements col-
lectifs: architects, activists, planners, psychoanalysts, residents, doctors,
artists, and historians must all contribute.
. The planning of équipements collectifs cannot be done from a perspective of
construction alone: the construction and maintenance of both physical facili-
ties and the institutions needed to run them should be the focus of planning
work. This has implications for architecture, too: if architects are responsible
for the design of institutions, such design must be expanded to encompass
maintenance, programming, and institution-building.
. Decentralised but urbanised équipements collectifs are necessary: neither
cities nor housing developments should exclude spaces for care (including
preschools, mental health facilities, etc.) These facilities cannot be conceived
to support the reproduction of existing social order (as infrastructure does)
but must also enable liberated forms of existence.
. Équipements collectifs are mental formations as much as a physical, financial,
and social ones.

These theses may seem familiar as an index of a certain set of late 1960s and
early 1970s beliefs about architectural practice, and yet, perhaps because
CERFI’s work has only been partially translated into English, their absorption
into anglophone intellectual histories of architecture and infrastructure is
patchy. Aside from a dossier on CERFI’s work by Sven-Olov Wallenstein,
Helena Mattsson, and Meike Schalk, and an analysis of some of their work by
Simone Brott,4 anglophone analyses of CERFI’s contributions to architectural
theory largely present the group as a project of Guattari.5 In France, many of
CERFI’s theses and teaching practices were absorbed into architectural peda-
gogy and history, and their work is more widely known; the group’s history
has been narrated by various members, and their output has been analysed
by intellectual historians and historians of institutional psychotherapy.6 But
because CERFI was deeply impacted by architectural questions, their ideas
should be more fully understood in relation to architectural thought.
 1003 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

A brief history of CERFI

CERFI grew out of the militant left interdisciplinary research group FGERI (Féd-
ération des groupes d’études et de recherches institutionnelles, or Federation
of Institutional Study Groups and Research, founded in 1965) as a kind of
holding structure for funds that would support the FGERI’s work. CERFI was
also set up to help manage a loss of funding from the reorganisation of
medical payments to doctors at the psychiatric clinic where Guattari worked.7
Though its scope quickly moved beyond these purely financial considerations,
the financial links between CERFI and other groups reveal intellectual affiliations
as well. Indeed, CERFI was deeply marked by Guattari’s involvement in the prac-
tice of institutional psychotherapy, which he practised with the analyst Jean
Oury at the clinic at La Borde outside of Paris. A process intended to transform
the relationship between doctor and patient, to de-stigmatise mental health
care, and to understand how social institutions contributed to mental illness,
institutional psychotherapy interrogated and transformed social structures as
well as patients.8 Insights from work at La Borde helped Guattari develop
many of the ideas in Anti-Oedipus, which he published with Gilles Deleuze in
1973.
Guattari’s ability to build groups and institutions, and later, his fame, mean
that he is often given sole credit for ‘driving’ the organisation, but this would
be a mistake; CERFI was truly a collective enterprise shaped by many other pro-
tagonists who held sometimes conflicting positions. Key figures were Francois
Fourquet, who had worked with Guattari at the psychiatric clinic at La Borde,
and later became a social scientist-historian, and Anne Querrien, who was offi-
cially the group’s secretary and unofficially a primarily organising and concep-
tualising force. In particular, Querrien’s ability to manage funding contracts
enabled CERFI’s interdisciplinarity and polyphony. Lion Murard, Rose-Marie
Royer, Liane Mozère, Florence Pétry, Hervé Maury, Olivier Quérouil, Marie-
Thérèse Vernet-Stragiotti, and others also helped to keep the group running,
spearheading research projects, managing finances, writing research reports,
editing Recherches, and applying for funding. Architects and designers had
been members of the FGERI and continued to have a presence in CERFI. Alain
Fabre and Aymeric Zublena, who lent CERFI extra space from their architecture
office in the Dassault apartment were, briefly, participants. Gérard Buffière,
Catherine Cot, Jacques Depussé (another office donor), René Poux, Alain
Schmied, Estelle Schmied and even the fashion designer Agnès B. participated
in various CERFI projects.9 Women were also a key part of CERFI, but are
often not given credit for its work; it is crucial that their contributions and
those of other members not be left out of its history.
CERFI was by nature interdisciplinary: according to Mozère it was not ‘a
school or a theoretically unified group’ but a ‘place of experimentation’
where ‘practices and sensibilities’ were ‘hybridised’.10 Enabling this radically
interdisciplinary orientation of the group and its journal was CERFI’s ability to
attract funding. After 1968 especially, contracts from the Ministry of Equipment,
along with other state sources, gave small salaries to former militants, allowing
1004 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

them to refocus their work in the service of improvement of the operations of

state planning without actually having to work for the state to do so. This
was what Louis Althusser might have called an inoculating gesture on the
part of the state; while funds were arranged by people sympathetic to CERFI’s
ideas, they also could be justified as a strategy of refocusing militant energy.
Indeed, Guattari’s advocacy of a ‘molecular revolution’, a form of micropolitical
intervention he promoted after the incomplete large-scale revolutions of 1968,
must have been inspired by his work on numerous small, collaborative, partici-
patory projects that CERFI initiated; CERFIstes felt it was worthwhile to become
involved in social transformation on a highly local scale, and micropolitics were
in practice as Guattari’s book Molecular Revolution (1977) was written. With
state funds, and most intensely from 1971 to 1976, CERFI organised an impor-
tant integrated childcare centre in the new town of Melun-Sénart, the Centre
Désirée-Clary, which combined daycare facilities, leisure facilities for children,
a school, child protection services and after-school care; they studied Alma-
Gare, a neighbourhood of worker housing in Roubaix, and proposed interven-
tions for improvement; they planned mental health facilities in new towns (work
which led partially to the development of similar services in Paris); they helped
preserve a workers’ retreat and establish a cultural centre at the Buisson Farm
outside the former Menier Chocolate Factory in Noisiel. These were small-
scale yet meaningful interventions into urban spaces, many of which continue
today.
By 1973, according to intellectual historian Francois Dosse, CERFI had a staff
of 75 that each received salaries of 1,500 F per month; Fourquet says that its
research contracts from 1971 to 1972 supported about twenty researchers.11
Dosse, whose history of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration is a key anglo-
phone source on this time period — is somewhat dismissive of this activity, men-
tioning the drugs purchased from the CERFI ‘cash machine’ and spurious
‘research projects’ conducted by anyone with a halfway-decent proposal. But
the group nonetheless carried out a series of research programmes that
enabled its members to work outside of their professional competences and
to experiment with cross-disciplinary work. Guattari called this practice ‘trans-
versality’, and he thought it would produce new political realities by provoking
people to act outside of their zones of competence, creating new alliances
according to desire. CERFI offered a lived experience of transversality, linking
theorisation, practice, and sometimes even militant agitation. What made this
transversality possible was something much more pragmatic, however: funding.

Developers and programmers

Many of CERFI’s research contracts were obtained thanks to work they did on
équipements collectifs and mental health care. In 1967, Recherches (which
usually published themed issues devoted to a single research topic) put out
an issue about ‘Programming, architecture and psychiatry’, featuring articles
on the design of mental health facilities (Fig. 3). This issue put psychiatrists
and practitioners of institutional psychotherapy in dialogue with architects
 1005 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

Figure 3.
Recherches 6 (June 1967) on
programming, architecture and
psychiatry (left); and CERFI’s
research report ‘Programming
Collective Equipment in New
Towns’, 1972 (right). Image at left
courtesy of Reveue Recherches,
http://www.editions-recherches.
com/revue3.php

Nicole Sonolet, Aymeric Zublena, Alain Schmied, Alain Fabre, and Albert
Schwartz.12 After 1968, 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 Equipment at the time.13 Conan offered CERFI a chance to
test the theoretical claims from this publication, and proposed that CERFI
work on projects to plan mental health facilities in the New Towns of Évry
and Melun-Sénart; this contract was signed on 4 May 1971.14 CERFI later
received other contracts from the Ministry of Equipment. One built on the reflec-
tions on programming in the contract for mental health facilities, and examined
the topic of programming new towns more generally; extracts were published in
Recherches 17. A second contract allowed the group to write a genealogy of
équipements collectifs, and a third contract was given to the group to contribute
to the seventh regional and economic development plan in France.15 This is
quite a varied list of activities for one organisation; with funding from the Min-
istry of Equipment, CERFI did very practical research, historical research, theor-
etical speculation on the nature of planning, and then made concrete
recommendations for how to reform national spatial and economic planning.
All of this work was interdisciplinary, and architects participated on these
research teams alongside historians, philosophers, doctors, artists, urbanists,
and many others.
CERFI’s first research contract from the Ministry of Equipment from 1971,
‘Programmation des équipements collectifs dans les villes nouvelles — les équi-
pements d’hygiène mentale’ (‘Programming équipements collectifs in New
Towns — facilities for mental health’) offered one of the most significant oppor-
tunities to develop architectural ideas.16 The goal of this project was to plan
community mental health facilities which would give patients more autonomy
and be better integrated into urban fabric and life than the previous model of
the asylum. To fulfil this research contract CERFI organised a series of discussions
on new towns, programming, and mental health in October 1971.17 The first of
 1006 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

Figure 4.
Nicole Sonolet (1923–2015),
photograph by Edward Baran,
courtesy of Christine de Bremond
d’Ars
these meetings was held at L’école freudienne de Paris, and later ones were held
at other Parisian hospitals; they were presided over by Félix Guattari and
included major psychologists and psychiatrists involved in reforming mental
health care in France, including Drs. Ayme, Bonnafé, Barthelemy, Bailly-Sallin,
Daumezon, Leroy, Meleze, and Paumelle. Several architects were present: a
M. Hountou (likely Michel Hountou), Simon Koszel from the Groupe Ludic,
who designed imaginative children’s playspaces, Alain Schmied, who had
been a member of the FGERI and had written a text on architecture in the
first issue of Recherches, and Nicole Sonolet, another contributor to Recherches,
and one of the first female architects to have a solo practice in Paris (Fig. 4).
Sonolet’s contributions were particularly forceful; she was, at the time, the
French expert in incorporating the insights of institutional psychotherapy into
architectural design. After completing a design thesis at the Ecole de Beaux
Arts on the architecture of mental health facilities, she designed and supervised
construction of a mental hospital, L’eau-vive, at Soisy-sur-Seine (Fig. 5) outside
of Paris from 1960 to 1965, a project she realised in close collaboration with the
psychiatrist Philippe Paumelle, who also participated in the meetings for this
CERFI project. Sonolet had published conclusions from her research in the
eminent journal Esprit and was friendly with Guattari, who had written a long
letter to her requesting her help with this project.18
The group 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, La Programmation des équipments collectifs dans les villes nouvelles.
In this booklet, CERFI transcribed conversations of their meetings and wrote rec-
ommendations and executive summaries. The report therefore provides a
helpful record of the forms of research (conversation and interviews, in this
case) and variety of positions CERFI eventually synthesised into recommen-
dations. Via the report, CERFI loosely defined architectural programmes for
mental health care and, acknowledging challenges in a development climate
that favoured profit, nonetheless proposed means to finance and institutionalise
them. The lack of French mental health services at the time was, they thought, a
crisis, but their plans to weave mental health services into the urban fabric of
new towns could become a model and spur for increasing mental health ser-
vices in France overall.19
Planning care facilities would happen through programming, a special term
for CERFI that encompassed architectural as well as other forms of planning. Dis-
cussion about programming mental health facilities offered CERFIstes opportu-
nities to transfer architectural ideas into institution-building techniques adapted
from institutional psychotherapy, and vice versa. Statements in the report by the
architect Alain Schmied illustrate this line of thought. For him, architects were
the ‘interpreters of groups […] they transcribe an organisation through a
method of construction’.20 While this may seem like a very simple definition
of architectural practice, it sets architects in a position akin to that of institutional
psychotherapists, who similarly work on re-transcribing and remaking relation-
ships between people and social institutions. At the same time, like many archi-
tects of his generation, Schmied sought programmatic flexibility within
 1007 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

Figure 5.
Nicole Sonolet, ‘L’eau vive’ hospital
at Soisy-sur-Seine, 1960–1965,
photograph courtesy of Christine
de Bremond d’Ars

architecture. He did not want to lock people into what he called ‘desired
relationships’ through architectural form, but instead saw design as a way to
create a form of institutional becoming instead. Schmied resisted creating typol-
ogies for hospitals (which he referred to as ‘schemas-type’,) taking a stand —
whether deliberately or not — against an Aldo-Rossian semiotic ideal of typol-
ogy. In this discussion, Schmeid also revealed his opposition — common at the
time especially amongst left designers marked by the changes in architectural
culture and education after 1968 — against the idea of creating a standardised
and repeatable architectural ‘solution’ to a problem. Instead, he called for
deeper and more specific conversations about need as a means of generating
form. Schmied took ideas about the uncertain futures of unfolding conversa-
tions from psychoanalytic thought and remade them as design principles.
‘The danger’, stated Schmied, ‘would be to block all possibility of exchange’.21
Conversation, in contrast, would allow for more flexible spaces and better sol-
utions to problems.
Schmied incorporated the language of institutional psychotherapy into archi-
tectural discourse, going beyond the planning politics that had inspired the cre-
ation of the Parisian New Towns. Planned beginning in the late 1960s, and built
during the 1970s, Paris’s five new satellite cities, Marne la Vallée, Cergy-Pon-
toise, Evry, St. Quentin-en-Yvelines, and Melun-Sénart were meant to correct
many of the problems of earlier suburban social housing projects, which had
no services, little urban life, and were objects of scorn from both the Lefebvrian
left and the anti-welfare-state right. New Towns, in contrast, would have exten-
sive services, and would be designed as urban spaces rather than in isolation
from one another. They promised ‘animation’ but they were also intended
1008 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

also help to solidify centre-right French state political power against the City of
Paris and its Red Belt to the east.22 Behind this shift from housing estates to New
Towns was lingering class and postcolonial bias: whereas immediate post-war
housing types were intended for guest workers from former French colonies,
as well as rural French residents migrating to cities, New Towns were imagined
to be made primarily for middle class residents: presumably with long family his-
tories in France, and presumably people who would demand more from their
environments. Perhaps, like the character in Annie Ernaux’s chronicle of this
time, The Years, they could even be former militants who might just want a
nice apartment close to Paris in which they could peacefully raise a family.23
Aware of these politics, CERFI considered how équipements collectifs could
serve as sites of exchange between people with different immigration histories.
A local official participating in the conversation, a Madame Mahe, noted the dif-
ficulty of producing integration through architecture; in her community, differ-
ent stairways were often marked and occupied by people of different national
origins.24 In other words, collective equipment would not necessarily produce
collectivity. This is why programming processes were important. As Simon
Koszel of the Groupe Ludic pointed out, the directors of New Towns wanted
programmes, but they were attempting to programme in a void.25 Program-
ming psychoanalytic space required psychoanalytic and conversational
methods, and these methods yielded insights about what programmes were
needed that would otherwise be impossible to divine.
Nicole Sonolet had more concrete suggestions based on her experience: she
argued that certain architectural features were necessary in mental institutions,
such as private spaces, access to greenery and to light, and smaller units which
would allow one nurse or doctor to attend to a smaller group of patients, akin to
what she and Philippe Paumelle had planned at the hospital at Soisy-sur-seine.
She diagrammed ideal spatial relationships between the elements in hospitals to
help advance the design process. Like Schmied, however, she did not believe
that a single architectural typology would work in all hospitals, nor did she
believe that one could create a formula that would translate health into
space. In a 1968 letter to an architecture student who had asked her to if she
could summarise the typological conclusions of her research from her publi-
cation in Recherches from 1967, she immediately and forcefully refused to do
so, insisting that such conclusions could only be drawn through experience in
programming itself, and advised the student to try to obtain his own experiences
in this kind of design process.26
Even though programmes could be the subject of research and discussion,
and one could draw conclusions about ideal possibilities, programming primarily
unfolded through conversation, collaboration, and experience. Sonolet, like
Schmied, also understood conversational practice inspired by institutional psy-
chotherapy as a venue for a deliberate form of programming which would
enable insights about desires and needs to unfold. Sonolet and Schmied
turned to psychoanalysis in order to both explain their own working practices,
and to take a stand against reducing architecture to a set of spatial formulas.
We might today consider this a kind of ‘slow programming’, a practice which
 1009 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

responds imaginatively to needs not yet understood, an idea that extends

beyond the principles of ‘participation’ and ‘animation’ called for by the
French State in that period.
CERFI’s conversational method extended to consider not only programming,
but how buildings and institutions could be realised and maintained. In one
meeting documented in the research report, Guattari asked the group to
think about a new role for the promoteur, often translated as ‘developer’, or
the entity that both developed and orchestrated funding, design, and construc-
tion of facilities. He stated, ‘The role of the promoteurs of mental health can’t be
reduced to pure real estate. We can’t simply programme and build real estate
solutions; we must make institutions.’27 Such institutions — not unlike the insti-
tution of CERFI itself — would link design, production, maintenance, and the
manipulations of capital, enabling the realisation of desired projects. Building
institutions as a design practice required architects, in turn, to transform their
understanding of design to be not merely about drawing plans, but also
about their unfolding in time. Sonolet and Schmied agreed, and explained
that architecture was not just the management of ‘square footage’ (though
that was important) but that architects would need to assume the task of insti-
tutional programming as well. Guattari claimed that this allowed them (and
anyone involved in the project) to slip into other roles: they stated that they
might sometimes act as historians, or as psychoanalysts looking at ‘social
libido’ rather than square feet. Schmied, Sonolet and Guattari thus positioned
architecture as a fluid discipline; the institution-making called for by CERFI facili-
tated this fluidity. What we today might call interdisciplinarity would, for CERFI,
occur simply through the process of collective work, which seemed a necessary
alternative to the bureaucratic institutional cultures that had made mental
health unworkable in so much of post-war France. CERFI’s insistence on imagi-
native solutions sparked by true conversation, on long-term institution building
and maintenance as part of design process, still seem like important insights.

From équipements collectifs to équipements du pouvoir

Starting in 1973, and building on the more practical research undertaken in

1971 and 1972, two other research teams funded by CERFI wrote explicit gen-
ealogies of équipements collectifs. One team was led by Michel Foucault; they
researched and published two editions of a book on the design and planning of
hospitals in eighteenth-century France in which Foucault first articulated a
concept of biopolitics.28 The second team was led by Francois Fourquet and
Lion Murard, with contributions by Guattari; they produced a twentieth-
century genealogy of the idea of équipement which they published as an
issue of Recherches.29 Both teams used historical research to open up ideas
about what équipements collectifs could become.
As part of his work at the Collège de France, Foucault carried out yearly col-
lective research projects with a small groups of students. CERFI’s funding was
directed towards one of these projects in 1973–1974 on ‘L’institution hospita-
1010 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

lière à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, généalogie des équipements collectifs’ (usually

translated as ‘The Institution of the Hospital at the End of the Eighteenth
Century: Genealogy of Public Amenities’).30 Participants in the seminar included
Blandine Barret-Kriegel, the architects Bruno Fortier and François Béguin, and
Foucault’s niece Anne Thalamy. Fortier was essentially a co-organiser of the
seminar; the recipient of a research grant from the Comité pour la recherche
et du développement en architecture (Committee for Research and Develop-
ment in Architecture, or CORDA), he had been instrumental in coordinating
and funding the group’s work. Together, this group examined the architecture
of hospitals at the historical moment when their design was seen as essential to
promoting a healthy city and thus a healthier and more rational state.
Foucault and his collaborators published a book, Les Machines à guérir
(Curing Machines) summarising their research.31 In his presentation of the
group’s research (published in English in 1980 as ‘The Politics of Health in the
Eighteenth Century’) Foucault argued that biopolitics particular to the late eight-
eenth century were elaborated through the medicalisation of space and the sub-
sequent creation of spatial-medical dispositifs, or material and institutional
instruments. But it was Bruno Fortier who drew out architectural conclusions
of this text. In his chapter, titled ‘The Architecture of the Hospital’, he described
the process by which the design of hospitals was standardised, showing how
control over hospital design shifted from being the purview of architectural pro-
fessionals, to becoming a medical concern, and then, once deemed important
enough, again the purview of architects.32
Fortier made an implicit connection between understandings of the social
effects of architecture in the eighteenth century and understandings of these
effects in twentieth-century modern architecture, arguing that architectural
standardisation produced the idea of a perfectible architectural type.33 Thus,
the political importance of the hospital’s health-effects did not just extend to
the bodies of citizens, as Foucault had explained, but also helped architects
make a claim that there was an ideal form for a particular programme —
which is, of course, the opposite of the anti-typological claim Schmied made
in the 1971 research report. This eighteenth-century idea of a perfectible
type, Fortier argued, allowed for a conceptualisation of programme and organ-
isation as something separate from previously ‘architectural’ concepts of order
or decoration.
Hospitals created by non-architectural experts in the eighteenth century were
standardised and produced measurable effects; they provided a machinic model
upon which architects would later rely for an ideal of functionality, explained
Fortier. But it is important to note that Foucault and Fortier — echoing argu-
ments made earlier by Schmied, Sonolet and Guattari — all made a case
against assuming that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between
health and architecture. Unlike US-based behaviourists, who often claimed
that architectural design shaped the social uses of space, the CERFIstes had a
more nuanced view of how design, health, and use were connected.34 Foucault
and Fortier explained that there had been an eighteenth-century fantasy of a
spatial ‘curing machine’, but their analyses make clear that this was a fantasy
 1011 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

discourse about the design of the operation of government, rather than a

reality; architecture was not a machine, and architecture alone could not
produce forms of behaviour or new political realities.35
Though I do not know if Fortier was in conversation with Sonolet and Schmied
or how aware he was of CERFI’s 1971 research, his analyses complimented and
intensified their conclusions about programming. Fortier’s genealogy shows
that the idea of programming had a long history of being reclaimed by prac-
titioners of various disciplinary backgrounds, and he made the case that archi-
tecture had long been open to concerns that seemed to be outside of its
disciplinary purview. Extending his work to the 1970s might lead one to con-
clude that the collaborative and multi-disciplinary programming work under-
taken by Guattari, Sonolet and Schmied would be in keeping with the field’s
expansive history.
CERFI’s 1971 research project also anticipated Foucault’s first theorisation of
the term biopolitics, though Guattari, Schmied, Sonolet, and the doctors they
collaborated with did not coin this term. But from the beginnings of their con-
versations, it is clear that the CERFIstes were trying to produce alternatives to
a biopolitical calculus where decisions about governance were made accord-
ing to monetary value assigned to life.36 Biopolitics justified the French state’s
construction of infrastructure like the eighteenth-century hospitals Foucault
and Fortier described, as well as the twentieth-century research contracts
that CERFI received to install mental health services in new towns. But, in
stark contrast, CERFI’s équipements collectifs were organised around the pro-
vision of care for its own sake; perhaps their alternative practice of life main-
tenance might have even sharpened the critical definition of biopolitics by
Foucault.37 CERFI’s counter-biopolitics turned the logics of state funding on
its head. But it is important to acknowledge that this was only possible
because the state was also a funder, and state funding was not fully neolib-
eral. It could be given out by imaginative thinkers like Michel Conan and his
colleague Isabelle Billiard for projects that sought to change its emerging neo-
liberal calculi. 38
CERFI’s second research contract from the Ministry of Equipment allowed
Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard to write their own genealogy of équipe-
ments collectifs in 1973; they produced a book-length issue of Recherches
called Les Equipements du pouvoir (Infrastructures of Power) (Fig. 6). This
extended CERFI’s concepts of infrastructure beyond the medical one outlined
in both La programmation des équipements collectifs and Machines à guérir.
In this project Fourquet and Murard — I believe drawing from CERFI’s work
on mental health care — traced a broad history of équipements collectifs in
France and reflected on what architecture and infrastructure had to do with
the operations of power. These analyses of the power-effects of équipement
are CERFI’s most explicitly infrastructural theories of power and emerge from
Fourquet and Murard’s genealogical reading of the idea of équipement.
Rather than fix meanings of the term equipement, Fourquet and Murard
opened it up to redefinition by examining its shifting military, bureaucratic
and architectural origins. They considered its use in French planning discourse
 1012
Figure 6.
Recherches 13 (December 1973),
‘Les équipements du pouvoir’
(journal and paperback edition
published by Editions 10/18.)
State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor
and in UN documents, and noted the term’s architectural life (the Athens
Charter had referred to ‘installations de caractère collectif’, or installations
with a collective character.)39 Equipement, Fourquet and Murard argued, was
also part of the language of the Resistance, and was the term around which
the first post-war economic plan was oriented. Fourquet and Murard further
traced the origins of the term to Jean Monnet’s immediate post-war work at
the Commissariat General du Plan, a major reconstruction agency charged
with spurring French territorial and economic modernisation after the Second
World War. Fouquet and Murard did not mention this, but the Plan was, for
many reasons, able to work outside of the traditional channels and practices
of French bureaucracy to promote modernisation projects, and as such was
seen as an Americanising and liberalising force, perhaps even, in its espousal
and development of the use of public-private partnerships in France, an insti-
tution that laid the groundwork for neoliberalism.40 Actors at the Plan — like
members of CERFI — worked transversally, across disciplines and bureaucratic
boundaries. They invented new roles for ‘promoteurs’ and had access to inde-
pendent funding.
Indeed, we could see CERFI’s inhabitation and redefinition of the Plan’s tech-
niques as perhaps just another state-funded model for ‘working outside the
system’ and as perhaps an unwitting espousal of a neoliberal order. This,
though, would be an over-simplification; further, even though Deleuze and
Guattari’s writing has been made, especially by architects, to align with neolib-
eral logic, I don’t think CERFI should be understood as a neoliberal institution.41
CERFIstes did not want to eliminate the state or to align it with market forces;
they depended on the state to do their work and could not exist without it.
 1013 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

Rather, they wanted to remake the operations of the state according to the pre-
rogatives of both care and desire, and to purge the state of the economic reason
that made it both biopolitical and neoliberal.
Perhaps this is why Fourquet and Murard insisted that desire needed to be
part of an understanding of équipement. Desire, they explained, had not
been part of the history of this term as it was theorised and practised in
France, and in their final chapter of Equipements de pouvoir, they clarify that
équipement could be an expression of dominant priorities, but also a medium
to articulate desires for alternative priorities. The relationship between the
family and infrastructure was a key example of this. Fourquet and Murard
argued that the family was an outmoded institution that was enabled and
propped up by collective equipment such as schools, policies, laws, and
housing. But if then current forms of infrastructure propped up the family,
other infrastructures might allow new kinds of families to proliferate; équipe-
ment could either blindly reproduce social formations or help remake them.
What was important was tapping into desire.
It is also important to note that for Fourquet and Murard, desire was also in
part libidinal. Acknowledging this, they wrote, would lead to more transforma-
tive plans for équipement. Forquet and Murard wanted to open up équipement-
as-infrastructure not just to practices of care, as had been the case with Sonolet,
Schmied, Guattari, and the psychiatrists they worked with, but so that its ability
to either propagate violence or to be collectively refashioned would be clear. For
Fourquet and Murard, équipement seems like a Foucaudian dispositif, a tech-
nique or material system through which power relations and subjectivities are
formed. This is a very Lacanian conception of infrastructure; it both shaped sub-
jectivities and was shaped by them. However, in a more aggressive way than
Foucault did at the time, Fourquet and Murard claimed that infrastructure
was something that demanded both re-appropriation and remaking.

Intellectual history and architectural futures

This is only a brief summary of Fourquet and Murard’s work, and their texts and
planning projects demand longer analyses in English.42 But from these two brief
examples of CERFI’s practices and definitions of infrastructure, I hope it is clear
the group played a foundational role in developing a theory that relates infra-
structure to subjectivity, and that this thought emerged in dialogue with
attempts to plan such infrastructures. CERFI’s historical research, conversation,
collaboration and bureaucratic report-writing from 1971 to 1974 helped to gen-
erate theories of biopolitics, power, and infrastructure, and was primed by
earlier practical research in mental health. And although architects are often
seen to be great borrowers of theories from other fields, architectural and mili-
tant practice, as well as architectural thought, inspired in crucial ways what we
now think of as ‘French theory’. None of this would have been possible without
the state as a funding source, and without CERFI’s work to assemble the com-
munities of researchers necessary to make connections between historical, psy-
choanalytic, and architectural practices and ideas.
1014 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

CERFI’s funding largely dried up in 1974, after the death of Georges Pompi-
dou, whose administration advanced many major architectural projects, and the
election of the more fiscally conservative Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Under a new
Ministry of Equipment there were no more resources left for experimental pro-
gramming research, although Guattari did, that year, help to organise an impor-
tant presentation of CERFI’s ideas to the then present incarnation of the Plan
and the Mission of Urban Research at the Dieppe Colloquium (Colloque Poli-
tiques urbaines et planification des villes, 9–10 April 1974). Another issue of
Recherches, the highly collectible and influential ‘Trois millions de pervers:
grande encyclopédie des homosexualités’ (‘Three Million Perverts: the Great
Encyclopaedia of Homosexualities’) in 1973 had also provoked public outrage
and made acquiring contracts more difficult.43 While Recherches continued to
be published through the 1980s many of its researchers had to become profes-
sionally affiliated with other institutions and universities in order to continue
their work; some of the more militant who refused or could not do this due
to lack of credentials simply found other jobs.44 The particular institutional affi-
nities and cross-disciplinary pollination necessary to generate innovative theories
of infrastructure and new possibilities for architecture were over by the time
CERFI’s last funding contracts were completed.
Nonetheless, this brief period of collaboration enabled by the excess of state
funding, by militant energy, and by the desire to work across and through dis-
ciplines offers a view of programme that architectural practitioners may want to
reconsider, one that was never fully realised. While it would take Rem Koolhaas
— someone also deeply marked by the events of 1968 — many more years to
champion programming as one of the central activities of architecture, the
members of CERFI already insisted that it could link together the creation of
physical, social, and infrastructural spaces and their maintenance. This was
not just a version of participatory planning, a field which would later develop
as a critical response to the same kind of bureaucratic planning procedures
CERFI tried to remake, but an entirely different way to conceptualise the
relationship between desire and a collective. CERFI’s work enabled a critique
of the state, but also an inhabitation of its languages, acronyms, and funding
structures in order to transform state operations slowly from the inside out.
In a time of so much austerity in architecture and state finance, it is hard to
imagine that there could somehow be a culture of readily available funding
for more militant research, especially when we struggle to obtain funding for
basic needs like health and infrastructure. This difficulty makes it even more
important to have concrete models and visions of collective infrastructure
from which we can articulate demands for the infrastructures we need today:
spaces for care, decarbonisation, architecture and art. While lacking the more
rigorous considerations of intersectionality we would call for today, and while
we likely also need broader visions for infrastructure too, CERFI’s micropolitical
interventions and their entangled model of history, theory, and practice offer
both a model for what can be accomplished on an architectural scale, and
what might happen when architects collaborate with designers of other sorts.
 1015 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

Finally, in a culture where an excess of data seems to make automated, data-

driven models of programming — such as Google’s Quayside and other so-
called ‘smart cities’ — seem alluring and desirable, it is worth returning to
CERFI’s expansive definitions of équipments collectifs and what I’ve called
‘slow programming’ as an alternative model of doing social work with architec-
ture. CERFI’s work shows that desire doesn’t need to be transcribed into data,
and then imperfectly extracted and abstracted out of it. Instead, desire can be
articulated through group conversation. CERFI meetings may have been long,
and apparently there were many intense dramas, but the group produced prac-
tices and theories foundational to the recent history of architecture, thanks to
the funds from the state it tried to remake from within.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Anne Querrien, Daglind Sonolet and Christine de Bremond d’Ars
for their generous assistance with this research, James Graham for his generous
help with photography, Florence Pétry and Editions Recherches for their kind
permission to reproduce images of Recherches, Jada Cannon and Ida Hansen
for their assistance with images, Eric Anglès for translation assistance, Peg
Rawes for speaking with me about architectures of care, and Charles Rice,
Barbara Penner, Hélène Frichot, Julieanna Preston, Reinhold Martin, Helena
Mattsson and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this
material.

Notes and references

1. This was confirmed by Anne Querrien, in an interview by Meredith TenHoor, 15 July 2019.
The office was located at 103, boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris’s 3rd district, and was
rented to the architects Alain Fabre and Aymeric Zublena, who offered two rooms they
did not need for their architectural work to CERFI. Previously, CERFI had offices in the
15th arrondissement, which were loaned by the architect Jacques Depussé (who had
also designed an extension of the clinic at La Borde), and at Félix Guattari’s home on the
rue de Condé in Paris. Dassult’s ownership of this building is stated in Francois Dosse’s intel-
lectual biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 269–70.
2. Marcel Dassault’s aviation company was twice nationalised. Dassault’s son Serge, once he
obtained control of his father’s company, seems to have reacted to this with a passion for
the privatised; he obtained major stakes in the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro as
well as the water and infrastructure privatiser Veolia.
3. Since I began this project, I and a group of other scholars (Óskar Arnórsson, Dennis Pohl,
Camille Robcis, Anne Kockelkorn, Godofredo Pereira, and Susana Caló) have worked
together to re-read these theses about équipements collectifs, but these interpretations
are my own, and are primarily derived from CERFI’s published research reports, articles in
their journal Recherches, correspondence with Anne Querrien, the archives of the architect
Nicole Sonolet and the following texts: CERFI, ‘Programmation, Architecture et Psychiatrie’,
Recherches, 6 (1967); CERFI, ‘La programmation des équipements collectifs dans les villes
nouvelles (Les équipements d’hygiène mentale): Rapport sur l’exécution de la convention
1016 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

d’études entre le CERFI et le Ministère d’équipement et du logement (Direction de l’amén-

agement foncier et de l’urbanisme) du 4 mai 1971’ (Paris: Centre d’études, de recherches et
de formation institutionnelles, 1972); François Fourquet, L’accumulation du pouvoir, ou, Le
désir d’état: synthèse des recherches de Cerfi de 1970 à 1981, Recherches 46 (Paris: Revue
Recherches, 1982).
4. Simone Brott, ‘Equipments of Power: The Road and the City’, Thresholds, 40 (2012), 48–54;
Sven-Olov Wallenstein, ‘CERFI, Desire, and the Genealogy of Public Facilities’, SITE, 2
(2002), 12–13; Meike Schalk, ‘The Urban Mental Hospital and the State of Research’,
SITE, 2 (2002), 15–16.
5. See Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014); Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban
Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
6. For information about CERFI’s role in architecture in French, see Jean-Louis Violeau, Les
architectes et mai 68 (Paris: Recherches, 2005). Janet Morford’s doctoral thesis is one of
the most in-depth surveys of CERFI’s work. See Morford, ‘Histoire du CERFI: La trajectoire
d’un collectif de recherche sociale’ (DEA thesis, EHESS, 1985). The group’s history was nar-
rated by Francois Foruquet near the end of the publishing run of Recherches in Fourquet,
L’accumulation du pouvoir, ou, Le désir d’état; or in English, François Fourquet, ‘The
History of CERFI’, SITE, 2 (2002), 11. Anne Querrien and Liane Mozère, who played key
roles organising CERFI, have also written histories of the group. See Liane Mozère, ‘Foucault
et le CERFI : instantanés et actualité’, Le Portique. Revue de philosophie et de sciences
humaines, 13–14 (2004), <http://journals.openedition.org/leportique/642>; Anne Quer-
rien, ‘Le CERFI, l’expérimentation sociale et l’État: témoignage d’une petite main’, in
L’État à l’épreuve des sciences sociales, ed. by Philippe Bezes et al. (Paris: La Découverte,
2005), pp. 72–87, <https://www.cairn.info/l-etat-a-l-epreuve-des-sciences-sociales--
9782707147219-p-72.htm>. For more on Recherches, see Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix
Guattari; Stéphane Nadaud, ‘Recherches (1966–1982): Histoire(s) d’une revue’, La revue
des revues, 34 (2003), 47–76. For more on the history of institutional psychotherapy in
relationship to this moment in France, see also Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira,
‘CERFI: From the Hospital to the City’, London Journal of Critical Theory, 1.2 (2017), 83–
100. A particularly helpful source for this paper is a research report documenting state con-
tracts for architectural work in New Towns: Alexis Korganow, Tricia Meehan, and Clément
Orillard, ‘L’interaction ville-équipement en ville nouvelle: réception et adaptation de la
formule de l’équipement socio-culturel intégré’ (Paris, France: Ministry of Equipment, Trans-
port, Housing, Tourism and the Sea, September 2005).
7. Anne Querrien has stated that a 1967 social security reform led Guattari to initially form a
research bureau that could collect funds instead. Interview in Alexis Korganow, Tricia
Meehan, and Clément Orillard, ‘L’interaction ville-équipement en ville nouvelle’, annex 2.
8. For further discussion of the history of institutional psychotherapy in relationship to this his-
torical moment in France, see Susana Caló, ‘Can an Institution Be Militant?’, in Metabolic
Rifts. A Reader, ed. by PROSPECTIONS for Art, Education and Knowledge Production
(Lisbon, Berlin: Atlas Projectos, 2019), pp. 115–31; Sarah Marks and Camille Robcis, ‘Insti-
tutional Psychotherapy in France: An Interview with Camille Robcis’, Hidden Persuaders, 28
September 2017, <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/robcis-interview/>;
Valentin Schaepelynck, L’institution renversée: Folie, analyse institutionnelle et champ
social (Paris: Eterotopia, 2018).
9. I have created these lists from published texts in Recherches, from CERFI’s research reports,
interviews with Anne Querrien, and from Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari.
Some names of CERFI members are spelled incorrectly in the English translation of
Dosse’s book; I believe they are correct here.
 1017 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

10. Mozère, p. 13.

11. Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, p. 269; Fourquet, L’accumulation du pouvoir, ou, Le
désir d’état, p. 10.
12. CERFI, ‘Programmation, Architecture et Psychiatrie’.
13. Interview with Anne Querrien.
14. Anne Querrien has explained that Conan wanted to test the capacity of CERFI to work as a
kind of developer or instigator of collective equipment via this project. CERFI was not the
only group to receive funding from the Ministry of Equipment for work on équipements col-
lectifs in New Towns. Other groups included the SCOOPER, the Groupe de Sociologie
Urbaine, and the Bureau d’études et de réalisations urbaines, with which Aymeric
Zublena worked. See Korganow, Meehan, and Orillard, ‘L’interaction Ville-Équipement
En Ville Nouvelle’, pp. 20 and 30.
15. Ibid., p. 30.
16. Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira’s ‘CERFI: From the hospital to the city’ offers a helpful
analysis of this project, focusing on how CERFI modified ideas about mental health and its
place in urban design and planning in France.
17. CERFI had to submit official reports of the work completed for their various research con-
tracts and did so in this case by publishing a small booklet, La Programmation des équip-
ments collectifs dans les villes nouvelles (Programming équipements collectifs in new
towns). Many of CERFI’s research reports later were revised into articles in Recherches.
18. Nicole Sonolet, ‘Logements sociaux?’, Esprit, 385 (1969), 464–74. Félix Guattari to Nicole
Sonolet, ‘Letter from Félix Guattari to Nicole Sonolet’, 14 December 1967, Archives of
Nicole Sonolet.
19. CERFI, ‘Programmation des equipements collectifs dans les villes nouvelles’.
20. Ibid., p. 113. Schmied’s entire statement was recorded as follows: ‘Les architectes sont les
interprètes des groupes, pratiquement. Ils transcrivent l’organisation par une méthode de
construction. Le problème est d’articuler les éléments les uns par rapport aux autres sans
entraver certaines relations voulues. Le danger serait de ne pas avoir d’idée fixe et de
bloquer toute possibilité d’échange. Lorsqu’on évoque le problème de repas, du restaurant,
on est tout de suite aux prises avec un certain nombre de problèmes concrets et on est tout
de suite bloqué par des choses qui doivent être fixes. On ne peut pas se permettre de dire: «
c‘est une surface ». Ce qui serait dangereux c’est de fixer des modèles utilisables partout
avec des schémas-type. Il faut rechercher une articulation, un système de relations et à
partir de cela les volumes se déterminent de façon beaucoup plus libre.’ There may be a
small transcription error in this report; Schmied states that the danger would not be to
have an ‘idée fixe’ but as this seems contradict everything else he states it seems likely
that the danger would be to have too many set ideas, and not enough flexibility. In
other words, ‘Architects are the practical interpreters of groups. They transcribe an organ-
isation through a method of construction. The problem is to articulate elements in relation
to one another without impeding intended relationships. The danger would be to have set
and unchanging ideas that block all possibility of exchange. When we bring up the problem
of meals and cafeterias, we are having to deal with very concrete problems; we immediately
face things that need to be set, made specific. We can’t just say “that’s the area [in the
sense of required square meters].” What would be dangerous would be to prescribe
ready-made typologies everywhere. We have to look for articulations, systems of relations,
and from that, we can determine volumes [or forms] in a much freer manner.’
21. Ibid., p. 101.
22. For a genaeology of ‘animation’ in French architectural discourse see Cupers, The Social
Project.
23. Annie Ernaux, The Years, trans. by Alison Strayer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017).
1018 State-funded militant infrastructure? CERFI’s
équipements collectifs in the intellectual history of architecture
Meredith TenHoor

24. CERFI, ‘Programmation des equipements collectifs dans les villes nouvelles’, p. 84.
25. Ibid., p. 73.
26. J. M. Didillon to Nicole Sonolet, 15 February 1968. Personal archives of Nicole Sonolet;
Nicole Sonolet to J. M. Didillon, 16 February 1968. Personal archives of Nicole Sonolet.
27. In French: ‘Dans ce sens le rôle des promoteurs d’hygiène mental ne se réduirait pas à une
dimension purement immobilière. Il ne s’agirait pas de programmer et de réaliser seulement
des constructions immobilières mais des institutions.’ CERFI, ‘Programmation des equipe-
ments collectifs dans les villes nouvelles’, p. 58.
28. Les Machines à guérir: aux origines de l’hôpital moderne, ed. by Michel Foucault (Paris:
Institut de l’environnement, 1976); Michel Foucault and CERFI, Généalogie des équipe-
ments de normalisation: Les équipements sanitaires (Fontenay-sous-Bois, France: Centre
d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionnelles, 1976).
29. François Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les Equipements du pouvoir: villes, territoires et équi-
pements collectifs (Paris: Editions Recherches, 1976).
30. I outline the history of this research seminar and its theorisation of biopolitics in Meredith
TenHoor, ‘The Architecture of the Market: Food, Media, and Biopolitics from Les Halles to
Rungis’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2017).
31. Les Machines à guérir. I have analysed this text at greater length elsewhere, as has Sven-
Olav Wallenstein. See Meredith TenHoor, ‘Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles’,
French Politics, Culture & Society, 25.2 (2007), 73–92; TenHoor, ‘The Architecture of the
Market’; Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). I eagerly anticipate the translation and
commentary on this text that Anne Kockelkorn and Moritz Gleich are preparing for publi-
cation; they have interviewed Foucault’s collaborators and promise to provide a fascinating
and deeper picture of this research project.
32. Bruno Fortier, ‘Architecture de l’hôpital’, in Les machines à guérir.
33. Fortier, ‘Architecture de l’hôpital’, p. 72.
34. For more on — and a more nuanced reading of — the US versions of these theories, see Joy
Knoblauch’s forthcoming book, The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and
Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2019).
35. Foucault clarified this claim in an interview with Paul Rabinow and Gwendolyn
Wright, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’ [Interview with Michel Foucault]’, Skyline, March
1982, pp. 16–20. See also Mozère, ‘Foucault et le CERFI’.
36. For instance, on the meeting held by CERFI to discuss mental health facilities in New Towns,
Simon Koszel explained that promoteurs wanted to make all équipement yield profit, when
not all kinds of infrastructure could be made profitable. See CERFI, ‘Programmation des
equipements collectifs dans les villes nouvelles’, p. 73.
37. Though not in reference to this particular project, Querrien later made statements in
support of this reading: ‘Anyhow, our hypothesis is that bio-power is the bottom, the
core, the body-without-organs of society. It is before, after, behind, under, everywhere,
and the only thing to do to resist power is to graft your desiring machine on it.’ Anne Quer-
rien, ‘CERFI: Four Remarks’, SITE, 2 (2002), 10.
38. For more on Conan and Billard’s work see Querrien, ‘Le CERFI, l’expérimentation sociale et
l’État’, p. 11.
39. Fourquet and Murard, Les Equipements du pouvoir, p. 255.
40. The impact of the Plan on the food infrastructures of France is treated in my forthcoming
book, Architectures of the Market.
41. Critics have claimed that this ‘molecular’ work easily aligned with the ideologies of neoli-
beralism; this is particularly true in architecture, as Douglas Spencer and Manuel Shvartz-
 1019 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 7

berg Carrio have traced. See The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architec-
ture, ed. by Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Douglas
Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an
Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
42. I will discuss Sonolet’s work in greater detail in a forthcoming project about her practice.
43. Querrien, ‘Le CERFI, l’expérimentation sociale et l’État’.
44. Interview with Anne Querrien.