In 1983, writing in the British literary magazine Granta, the American critic Bill Buford captured the literary avant-garde of his country in the term Dirty Realism, tracing a stylistic lineage from J. Fante to R. Carver via C. Bukowski and J. A. Phillips. Dirty Realism prefers short, unaffected and ironic stories about the wandering lives of people on the margins of America’s big cities. Seven years later, in 1990, the critic and historian L. Lefaivre transposed this literary genre to architecture in order to define a young generation of architects: J. Nouvel, R. Koolhaas, B. Tschumi, Z. Hadid, N. Coates. Lefaivre notes in their early work an unprecedented use of the crudest, poorest materials of ordinary construction in the industrial city of the late 20th century. Corrugated steel, bituminous rolls, sodium streetlamps, and galvanized wire mesh form the grammar of an architecture that enters into a frontal and critical relationship with the material and symbolic legacy of a century of modernization.

The workshop begins with a photographic reconstruction of the urban area of Marne-la-Vallée. In the tradition of the New Topographics, the students survey and document the rough, diffuse territory surrounding this school of architecture, revealing and depicting the environment from which Spolia are extracted. Like a portrait of an aging Ville Nouvelle, the photographic collection is composed of fragments of its most erudite architecture: J. Nouvel, C. Hauvette, H. Ciriani, C. de Portzamparc, F.-H. Jourda, G. Perraudin, F. Soler, B. Tschumi.