Antoine Grumbach

Antoine Grumbach (1942) is an artist-architect and urban designer who graduated from the Ecole des Beaux- arts in Paris in 1967 and received the Grand Prix National d’Urbanisme et d’Art Urbain in 1992. His international achievements are countless, as are his major architectural and urban planning projects, which include the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, the new inhabited bridge over the Thames in London, as well as the Greater Paris “Seine Métropole” project... For over 40 years, he taught at the Ecoles nationales d’architecture de Paris-La Villette et Belleville, the Ecoles des ponts et chaussées and the universities of Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Toronto, where he lectured on urban semiology. In addition to his international experience as an urban artist-architect, Antoine Grumbach became close to the great structuralist intellectuals from ‘67 to ‘69 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études, and attended Roland Barthes’ semiotics courses on the linguistics of discourse. Along with students from the ENSBA, including Christian de Portzamparc, he took part in Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, and attended Umberto Eco’s semiotics seminars in Milan. He explored the relationship between form and meaning, sign and perception. The relationship between city and text lies at the heart of his writings and works (La Ville est un livre in the MNAM-CCI collections). Antoine Grumbach is quickly recognized as one of France’s pioneers in the study and consideration of public space. Influenced as much by Structuralism as by Situationism, Grumbach’s work is based on respect for significant traces of tabula rasa, the resemantization of existing spaces. Antoine Grumbach sees the city as continuous, infinitely complex and perpetually unfinished, envisioning its development and renewal without necessarily anticipating its demolition or replacement. He sees modernity not as a rupture or restoration, but rather as a skillful interweaving of past and present

Submitted by Jeanne Bucher Jaeger