“Architecture as Medium: The Lieu Unique and Nantes’s Turn toward Sustainable Development”
39th Annual 20th & 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium
March 24th-26st, 2022
Pittsburgh, PA
That Nantes would be named European Green Capital for 2013 would have been nearly unimaginable twenty-five years prior. The closure of the city’s port in the 1980s led to defunct infrastructure, including an icon of Nantes’s manufacturing economy, the LU cookie factory. In the 1990s, however, the Allumées festival gave new life to the site, which the city subsequently transformed into the Lieu Unique, a premier cultural center. Yet the role the Lieu Unique played in heralding the city’s twenty-first-century dynamism—most evident today in its Quartier de la création—remains underexamined in French cultural studies.
Drawing on spatial-turn theories rooted in phenomenology and semiotics, I argue that the architecture of the Lieu Unique served as a medium to communicate the city’s nascent approach to urban development, one rooted in fostering local identity while reworking Nantes’s relationship to its geography, industrial heritage, and historical participation in the slave trade. The Lieu Unique’s design valorized the Canal Saint-Félix, challenging Nantes’s centuries-old ambivalent attitude toward its waterways. The cultural center’s industrial interior aesthetics and restored emblematic tower highlighted the city’s retooling of industry as patrimony. That the center showcased contemporary Malian art and hosted exhibitions dedicated to African artistic production furthered Nantes’s efforts to cultivate a relationship anchored in mutual respect and exchange with countries France had colonized or subjected to the triangular trade.
I conclude by positing that this three-pronged rethinking of local identity was an ecological gesture (following Michel Serres’ thinking) that spurred Nantes’s turn toward sustainable development.