Village Voice Bookshop

The Village Voice Bookshop has the pleasure of inviting you to meet Franco La Cecla to discuss his controversial pamphlet, Against Architecture.

Against Architecture is a passionate and erudite charge against the celebrities of the current architecural world, the archistars. According to Franco La Cecla, architecture has lost its way and its true function, as the archistars use the cityscape to build their brand, putting their stamp on the built environment with little regard for the public good. More than a diatribe against the trade for which the author trained, Against Architecture issues a call to rethink urban space and to take our cities back from Casino Capitalism which has left a string of failed urban projects. Informed by the works of Robert Byron, Mike Davis, and Rebecca Solnit, Against Architecture is a work of insight on resisting the tyranny of the planners and the spirit of place.

Franco La Cecla has taught cultural anthropology and worked as a consultant for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and for Barcelona Regional. In 2005, he founded the Architecture Social Impact Assessment. The author of Je te quitte, moi non plus ou l’art de la rupture amoureuse, Franco has also directed several documentaries, including In altro mare, winner of the Best Coastal Culture Film at the 2010 San Francisco Ocean Film Festival, and is currently working with Artline Films on Indian Kiss, and with Rai television on a series based on Against Architecture.

More than twenty years have passed since the girl Larry took to a drive-in movie was never seen or heard from again. He never confessed, and was never charged. His boyhood pal, Silas has since then become the town constable and another local girl has disappeared, forcing two men who once called each other friend to confront a past that they had thought buried for decades. Tom Franklin, whose Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was an Edgar Award Best Novel nominee, is the author of two previous novels, Hell at the Breech and Smonk, and a collection of short stories called Poachers.

Franco La Cecla will be introduced by Andrew Todd, founder of Studio Andrew Todd and former member of the Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Todd’s main project to date, the Young Vic Theatre, was built in London next to the Old Vic Theatre. Todd won numerous awards, including the RIBA National Building Award. In 2011, he was made Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Andrew Todd is the co-author of The Open Circle: Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments.

The Village Voice Bookshop has the pleasure of inviting you to meet Corinne Alexandre-Garner, editor of Dans l'ombre du soleil grec for La Quinzaine littéraire, Louis Vuiton, Georges Hoffman, director of l'Agence Hoffman and author and producer of the film A Parisian Friendship, Marc Parent, literary agent and former Buchet-Chastel editor for Petite musique pour amoureux, and Frédéric Jacques Temple, novelist, poet, French translator and biographer of Henry Miller, and author of the film directed by Daniel Costelle Chez Lawrence Durrell. The panel will discuss the life and work of Lawrence Durrell in celebration of the author's centenary. The evening will be followed by a screening of the two films, A Parisian Friendship and Chez Lawrence Durrell at the Action Christine cinema.

Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. His first authentic literary work was The Black Book, published in Paris in 1938 under the aegis of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. «In the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice», he later wrote. The novel was praised by T.S. Eliot who would publish his first collection of poems in 1943. From his years spent in Greece he drew a number of books on Cyprus, Rhodes and the other Greek islands but he is most famous for The Alexandria Quartet, inspired by a wartime sojourn in Egypt and completed in Southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Out of his new dwelling would come a final masterpiece, The Avigon Quintet. Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in France in 2012 by Buchet-Chastel under the title, Petite musique pour amoureux, in a translation by Annick Le Goyat.

Drawing from Durrell’s paintings, travel writing, poetry and letters, notably his correspondance with Henry Miller, a lifelong friend, Dans l’ombre du soleil grec – edited and prefaced by Corinne Alexandre-Garner – gives the reader insight to the rich and complex work of one of the last century’s major authors whose sensuous and solar writing not only describes the beauty of beloved places but also contrasting inner-landscapes.