tyler survant

Observations on Tour Totem

by Tyler Survant. Published in Log 49 (Summer 2020).

Tour Totem is a Paris high-rise on the Seine and the fictional residence of Florent-Claude Labrouste, the depressed, fortysomething antihero of controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Serotonin, published in English in November 2019. Designed by Andrault & Parat (ANPAR) and completed in 1979, the tower is a metabolist composition of glazed cubes cantilevered on concrete beams and angled to maximize views of the river. As its name suggests, these discrete volumes stacked around a central spine evoke the carvings of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. But Labrouste views its cellular form in fungal terms, as a “gigantic concrete morel.” He hates both the building and his live-in girlfriend (who loves the building), and soon abandons them both for the countryside. No doubt, for Houellebecq, the tower – a rational form following its function – is a totem of market society, that endless arena of exchange from which the author’s characters are often alienated due to failures in love and sex. As Houellebecq argues in his 1993 essay “Approaches to Disarray,” the built environment today is not architectural but infrastructural – supermarket shelving for the efficient circulation of transient occupants.

When his only friend leads small-scale dairy farmers in bloody protest against France’s crippling trade policies, Labrouste sympathizes from the sidelines, resigned to his impotence despite years working at the Ministry of Agriculture. Houellebecq later suggests that architects may be equally powerless in their own domain, when Labrouste (could his uncommon surname allude to that figure of ferrous 19th-century architectural rationalism, Henri Labrouste?) meets a man who reminds him of himself: “He was an architect, he told me. A failed architect, he said by way of clarification. Well, like most architects, he added.” ■

Cite

Tyler Survant, “Observations on Tour Totem,” Log 49 (2020).