What would it mean to design buildings that exceed the economic accountings of liberal biopolitics, that instead offer an entirely different rationale for supporting health? In the years that Michel Foucault conceptualized the term biopolitics, he was part of a constellation of researchers and architects who developed care praxes that defined the value of life and its maintenance through a desire-based calculus. The welfare state institutions of architect Nicole Sonolet in particular—mental hospitals, public housing complexes, and new village typologies built mainly in postwar France and postcolonial Algeria from the 1950s to the 1980s—were designed not only to support but to center the needs of people often excluded from design processes. Sonolet’s mental health centers for residents of Paris’s 13th arrondissement, in particular, were key projects for discovering a design practice tied to the provision of care for its own sake.
Although her work is formally sophisticated and theoretically rich, Sonolet’s work is not well known. She was admitted to study architecture at Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris in 1944, but her studies were interrupted by the Second World War; she completed her thesis project for a psychiatric hospital in 1954. During the postwar years and into the 1960s, she designed mid-sized subsidized housing complexes in the Parisian suburbs as well as private houses, which helped to fund her practice. In those years she also returned to the subject of her thesis, and began to design mental health care facilities. Her first major mental hospital was l’Eau Vive, located in the Parisian suburb of Soisy-sur-Seine, which she began to work on in conversation with the psychiatrist Phillippe Paumelle starting in 1958. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she and Paumelle collaborated again to build the Center for Mental Health of the Association de Santé Mentale 13 (or ASM 13) in Paris, a compliment to l’Eau Vive which was focused on outpatient care. In these years, Sonolet also published articles on social housing and the architecture of mental health, conducted research on environmental psychology, and taught at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture and the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, serving meals to striking students during 1968 from her kitchen.
