Suburban Alternatives

Winners of the Delano and Aldrich/Emerson Fellowship, FCML — Florian Camani and Mathilde Luguet, embarked in 2017 on a three-month journey across the United States to investigate a myth: the suburb, and to search for alternatives to the detached house. Their book, Suburban Alternatives, explores 50 housing projects built between the 1920s and 2010s — from major figures to lesser-known architects — and places them in dialogue with essays by French and American scholars specializing in suburban studies. In doing so, they reconnect with a long-standing conversation that too often oscillates between the American myth of the prairie city and the European ideal of the compact city.

Expanding on their American journey, FCML presented a lecture at the Maison Régionale de l’Architecture des Pays de la Loire, conceived with AHA, in which they define the intermediate not as a compromise, but as an active position — between architecture and urbanism, mediation and prefiguration. They explore territories that resist binary oppositions — metropolis vs. countryside, authorship vs. standardization, density vs. comfort — yet where the contradictions of our societies become most visible. The toolbox they brought back from America offers a new way to think about housing — not only in terms of design quality, but as a measure of our capacity to live democratically, here and now.