sculpture-habitacle 2, architectural sculpture, 1964. architect: andré bloc, 1896-1966.

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art history has favoured the idea of the precursor: the birth of this, the birth of that; of origins, and hence, of originality. but originality is no prerequisite for great architecture. most of our best houses were built according to type, invention playing little or no part in their conception. and now that the 20th century has taught us how the march of history is taking us nowhere in particular, alternative histories make sense - how about an art history of endings or the inconsequential?

in architecture, famous examples include the amsterdam school, an entire movement leading nowhere. in music, bach comes to mind. his final compositions in counterpoint were a full century out of synch with his surroundings. glenn gould and edward said called this late style, the colloquial of which is not giving a fuck, that intransigence which sometimes comes with old age. which brings us ever so neatly to andré bloc and his two final buildings. not that he could have known, they were to be his last.

bloc is hardly at the centre of the architectural canon, to most he is not even on the periphery. he had trained as an engineer, not an architect, and his importance in the field came as the founder and editor of l’architecture d’aujourd’hui, a magazine favouring experimental design. his impact through publishing was great and his influence is still felt: open any issue from the 1960's and you'll find a gold mine of outrageous projects from which the OMA-REX-BIG-MVRDV crowd have quarried so many of their ideas.

l’architecture d’aujourd’hui would show student work from the most interesting studios next to reappraisals of german expressionism, next to works by the böhm family and early buildings by robert venturi. the magazine offered a kind of level playing field on which even the advent of post-modernism became just another flowering of imaginative architecture. I quite like this way of looking at things. bloc's editorial policy contained an inherent criticism of industrial or mechanical modernism and the loss of freedom it had brought about. his built work was no different, though much more difficult to come by.

I had attempted to study bloc's work way back in the nineties but failed for lack of available material. instead, bloc's protegé, claude parent, kept turning up. the kind of architect who could not go to the toilet without issuing a manifesto in advance, parent along with his partner virilio had studied the bunkers of the third reich. when given the commission for a suburban church, they had it cast in concrete in the shape of...yes, you guessed it, a german bunker. what an image for a doomed, christian culture! what an obnoxious way to treat a client...I still cannot look at a page of their work without hearing the voice of miss piggy exclaiming, pretentious? MOI?!

andré bloc's work, the little I was able to find, was different. I want to write humble, but he was french, so let us settle for more searching, less categorical. he built very little, but wrote even fewer manifestoes. the villa is very good, a personal and generous house built for entertaining guests and working - I particularly fell for the little rooftop guest house which to me is a testament to his values. yet formally it is somewhat conventional when you consider the promise of his sculptures.

and there is no denying the fascination of his sculptures, how they relate to building, to space. the quality is hit and miss - bloc came late to sculpture as he did to architecture - but the hits are there for all to see. a less generous art historian might conceivably add that their forms are derivative, but at least bloc did one thing that was entirely his own: he continually tried to get his sculptures built - as architecture. and this is where things become interesting.

the first few translations of those into built form suffered from being rendered in white plaster which added little to what had already been present in the models. near the end of his life, bloc had the two sculpture-habitacles, we have been looking at, built in his own back garden, at his own expense, in crude brickwork and concrete. he was approaching seventy. imagine the amateur artist, waiting for so long to express himself. it could have been a recipe for disaster, it should have been, but the resulting buildings are all poetry and exude a boyish sense of adventure rare in architecture. even on a dark november day, they make you climb around with a silly smile on your face.

the brickwork plays a key part in his late success. it resembles what le corbusier had achieved in the maisons jaoul and should probably be included in the progeny of corbusier's liberating masterpiece. I would certainly gladly include bloc in the pantheon of brutalism. but aside from obvious qualities of texture, the choice of brick meant that bloc had to construct his habitable sculptures, as opposed to merely casting or carving them. the laws and limits concerning brickwork became his laws and limits, and in return the structures were informed with the ancient tectonics of brick and mortar and moved fully into the realm of architecture.

the process of translating bloc's delicate models to 1:1 building was done in stages, using on-site sculpture as opposed to drawings, placing the hand of the artisan above that of the draughtsman. I find this beautifully expressed in the brut of the brutalist brickwork, in which the movement of the hand is caught in time. invariably, bloc's choice of process and materials also affected his chosen forms, as the whole arp-moore-hepworth period feel of his sculptures receded.

in the end, andré bloc's work became profoundly original - original, yet the origin of nothing. perhaps this twist accounts for the freshness of ideas and spaces one is met with in the garden in meudon. these are works waiting to find their place in history; to become the beginning of something rather than simply the end of their artist. unsure where history is taking us, and uncertain if we care to go, we may still seek out andré bloc's sculptures-habitacles, now almost half a century old, to experience the thrill of unadulterated promise.