Triangular blocks and wind tunnels: Augustin Rey's logic of air resistance

Abstract

How does air shape our cities? How does air become a factor in urban design? In a session before the 1906 International Congress for Sanitary Dwellings, Adolphe Augustin Rey famously compared cities to vast bodies ‘furrowed by canals of air’. Rey (1864–1934), a Beaux-Arts-trained architect who would count Le Corbusier among his devotees, was then highlightinging his best-known project: the winning entry for the Fondation Rothschild's workers' housing competition in Paris. Conceived between 1905 and 1909, Rey's entry was a redesign of a triangular block formed by the Rue de Prague, Rue Charles Baudelaire, and Rue Theophile Roussel. Rey's design featured innovative open-air courtyards and perforated façades that would not only filter and cleanse the air inside the building, but would also contribute to healthier air in the city.This paper examines Rey's winning design from a different context: the burgeoning aeronautical culture in turn-of-the-century France. The focus will be on his drawings, with their depiction of buildings as white solids and of the dominant winds as dark lines of moving air with variable pressures: in short, architecture placed inside a wind tunnel. I argue that Rey's designs for the Rothschild competition provided an aerodynamic solution to urban block design. Rey's name is not usually associated with aeronautics, and yet the fact that his drawings look like wind tunnel visualisations is no mere coincidence. Here, the operative logic is that of resistance. Much like the French physiologist Xavier Bichat understood life as a product of ‘resistance’ against pathogens, Rey's designs show architecture as a product of air resistance. In the end, this paper proposes how one of the most fundamental aspects of twentieth-century urbanism, the design of the city block, can be viewed in the light of advances in aeronautics at the turn of the century.