Summary In the context of a reflection currently taking place in various French institutions on the consolidation of architecture as a subject of scientific research — in a process that is almost half a centurial — this text questions the idea of modernity in architecture, and analyses speeches that have explained the modernisation of society through architecture. Initially, it describes the context that led to the creation of CORDA in the early 1970s: a public body that promoted research “by and for” architecture. On the other hand, as an actor in that process, the author of the present text develops (on the basis of a concise ‘intellectual self-portrait’) the hypothesis of the break-up between architects and intellectuals which characterised the French landscape of the time — in clear contrast to the Italian case, for example. Thus, from the analysis of episodes and one-off cases illustrating the diversity of intersecting relationships, for example between the architect and the book, writers and architecture, or the building and the city, some aspects have been clarified which, taken as a whole (and to this end a transdisciplinary and transnational reading), strengthen the renewal of the history of contemporary architecture as a disciplinary field.