ABSTRACT
The work of Centre d'Etudes, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles (CERFI) appears as a point of intersection between several trajectories in post-war French architectural culture oscillating around the concept of needs from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this period, intense exchanges between architecture and social sciences facilitated a renewal of architectural culture, critical both of the discipline's position within the social division of labour and about its political agency. What started with Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe's moderate reformism targeting specific housing typologies, was extended towards a critique of the incompleteness and alienation of the political order in its longue duree, and a speculation about a prospective collective subject, the 'inhabitant', which would transcend the fragmentation and complexity of a society moving beyond Fordism. What started as a 'productive' relationship aimed at specific recommendations for architects and administrators, became a resource for a critique of architecture.
