Walking through someone else’s dream

(France, 1951-2013)

Urban Architect and sculptor, Pierre Bernard had a systematic practice of hanging. He developed ideas about urban dynamics and morphogenesis with physical laws that determine organic forms and structures. The installation presented at the théâtre d’Orléans features several hundred suspended cotton cord sculptures which he hooked while he was using public transport. He himself specifies : “The origin of my crocheted sculptures dates back to about thirty years ago. They are my way of carrying out research on shapes: of trying to understand ‘from the inside’ the wavy lines of a holly leaf, the way a snail’s shell grows, the structure of an ear… The stitches that follow on from one another remind me of when you say your rosary. These are pieces of time that take shape. It is a work on the boundary, on the threshold where the interior and exterior are fashioned at the same time. This is also a way of creating complex shapes with a continuous thread, from one single simple strand, using with only two variations, doubling or skipping a stitch. These soft shapes can take on an infinite number of positions, but they also have stable states, and an ‘ideal’ form.”

Maria Giudici (Italy, 1980)

Founded in 2014 and based in London and Milan, the Black Square agency has created a series of twelve black square models, illustrated by twelve prints and a book, which read as a slow vanishing of each module’s reliefs from both of the mediums. To this gradual erasement is added another attenuation : the form of the model whose photographic image hides the density and the sharpness of its contours. The project and its title explicitly refer to a form of collective action (the members of the black blocs anarchist —arrive, act and leave in total anonymity before and after a violent group action—a strategy used in 1980s West Berlin) Maria Giudici questions what falls within the iconoclasm, through the confrontations occurring between image and form. The impossibility of an image to completely translate a three-dimensional object, a part always remaining hidden, just like the almost total irreproducibility of black objects, lead the architect to push the limits of visibility. Concluding with what makes “block”, the density of an impenetrable non-space ready to fade to make room, not for emptiness, but for the recognition of what is still awaiting us does not yet exist.

(France, 1945)

The architect Patrick Bouchain is the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans’s guest of honor and has a major exhibition devoted to him. He has mastered the art of capturing, unifying and exposing understanding and know-how that enables us to live differently. Looking back over five decades of creation, this exhibition offers an unprecedented inventory of some one hundred and fifty projects designed by Patrick Bouchain from 1967 to 2017. It is possible thanks to the donation of the architect’s archive by the architect to the Frac Centre-Val de Loire – whose collection is one of the most important in the world concerning architecture’s relationship to experimentation and utopia. This monograph exposes an exceptional corpus of resources, allowing for a renewal of understanding about the work of Patrick Bouchain while re-examining the meaning of an architectural collection. The exhibition, designed as an atlas, reveals a first time look into the contents of numerous sketchbooks he created for each project. These books are a tool for observing the world, where the convolutions of drawing, collage and writing become intertwined with a seductive oral thought process that is unabashedly stimulated by a dialogue with society.

(Italy, 1931)

For over forty years, the Italian architect Fabrizio Caròla, impassioned by Africa since his first voyage in 1972, has built buildings in the form of domes, cupola or arches. Constructed for the most part on African soil respecting traditional Nubian building techniques, his projects seek to address the needs of disadvantaged populations in a sustainable manner. The expansion of the Kaédi hospital in Mauritania (1984), resembling at its start the orthogonal plan dating bake to the colonial era, is an example of Caròla’s approach, constantly searching for a symbiotic relationship between the subject and location while always being respectful towards local culture and lifestyle, especially in this case, when the patient’s family needs to stay in close proximity during their hospitalization. In order to achieve this, the architect divided the plan into several groups of circles centered around the patients rooms creating spaces for their loved ones to reside. He uses an ancestral compass construction technique, allowing the building of cupolas in raw or cooked earth bricks, without lead mesh or machines. All achieved by employing local labor and using materials from the surrounding areas, taking care to preserve any local traditional craftsmanship techniques. An advocate of architecture without an architect, Caròla prefers to build “signs” with a primary goal responding to human needs.

(Tunisia, 1985)

Born in Tunis, Nidhal Chamekh was marked by his family’s militant engagement. He arrived in Paris in 2008 and embarked on doing a thesis at the University Paris I. Translator for the migrants at the refuge camp in Calais called “La Jungle,” the artist, beginning at the camp’s formation, using a documentary style started gathering graphic and photographic reports. The environment created by Chamekh brings together a part of this collection as well as a video featuring a long fixed shot of the dwelling vanishing down the flames (Never give up). Proceeding the camp’s dismantling ordered by the Pas-de-Calais prefecture (Police services) in March 2016, several refugees, forced to abandon the community they built and invented together, set fire to their makeshift dwellings. Five assemblies arranged according to specific notions augment the globality of this memory: “common place,” “share,” “multiply,” “attach,” and “steal.” A large flag banner in tarpaulin blue uses materials from the camp to reinstate a national symbol. By confronting heterogeneous spaces-times these assemblages introduce discrepancies, even doubts about the history as it is stated, questioning what creates our relationship with the world, otherwise put living together: albeit contrary to how it appears, was the massive destruction of the jungle aimed at ending an unprecedented experience, the creation and living in a common shared world?

(The Netherlands, 1920-2005)

Constant, who trained as a painter, founded in 1948 the international movement COBRA with several European dissident surrealists, and advocated free, spontaneous and joyful art that reconnected with the universal through research on archetypal forms. At the beginning of the 1950s, Constant began thinking about urban reality, calling for a movement towards nomadism and the generalization of playful behavior. He dedicated himself for eighteen years exclusively to New Babylon, a radical illustration of “situationist unitary urbanism”. New Babylon is an “artificial environment,” technological architecture of networks based on nomadism, games and creative change. This city was to take the form of labyrinthine space where movements were no longer subject to the constraint of any spatial or temporal organization. The transformation of architecture would be through the movement of individuals; mobility would be that of migration. For Constant, “the labyrinthine form of the New Babylonian social space would be the direct expression of social independence.” Creation would become a permanent process, a daily activity: “Like the painter who creates an infinite variety of forms, contrasts and styles utilizing only a few colors, New Babylonians would be able to endlessly vary their environment, refresh it, recreate it, by making use of the instruments of technology.” (Constant)

Claudia Pasquero et Marco Poletto (Italy, 1974 et 1975)

Les jardins fluviaux de la Loire / A turbulent urbanity is designed by ecoLogicStudio, with the goal of considering how to better understand the turbulent nature of the Loire, a “wild river,” and to speculate on a prospective urban model for Orléans. Looking to overcome the contradiction between preserving the natural heritage of the land and the city’s development, setting an objective of developing an urbanity in co-evolution with the river’s dynamic character, its microclimate, and its capacity to self-regulate, ecoLogicStudio has implemented what it calls a “decentralized spatial memory.” Given the fact that catastrophic risk management is entrusted to only a few people, without sharing, the agency has developed a new protocol, founded on local collective resources and know how. To achieve this, ecoLogicStudio has created, via a computational grid affixed over a portion of the Loire, multiple scenarios for gardens as hypothetical uses for the future: Garden of Accretion, Garden of Crystallization, Garden of Entanglement and Garden of Sedimentation. These “operating fields,” equally materializing thanks to the support of geological forms from the river’s evolution, offer a means of intervening directly on the riverbed.

(Hungary, 1925 - France, 1996)

Architect and engineer, David Georges Emmerich began exploring the laws underlying the development of architectural form through morphogenesis in the early 1950s. He considered forms as self-organizing “geometric beings in space” created according to their own laws, very much like structures in nature. Aware of the issues and challenges of self-construction, growth and mobility, Emmerich aimed to blend architecture and engineering in a way that would allow for the creation of dwellings that were convertible, multipurpose and organically expandable, thanks to possible combinations of standardized elements. Utilizing a game of pick-up-sticks, Emmerich developed a principle for Tensegrity Structures, in which the equilibrium reached between traction and compression results in a stable and resistant construction in which the elements support each other. Tensegrity Structures like a “game to cram together or freely scatter, a game of movement and growth, whose morphological richness, inherent to natural structures is practically inexhaustible” (Emmerich). Without foundation and temporary, they can constitute the framework of a dwelling or the basic structure for a set of modular compartments.

Antón García-Abril et Débora Mesa (Spain, 1969 et Etats-Unis, 1981)

Building a part of nature with your own hands intervening as little as possible on the existing terrain, transforming raw materials into livable space, and mimicking the environment’s processes to intensify its specificities, are the objectives laid out by Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. At the “Tippet Rise Art Center,” a vast site bordering Yellowstone National Park in the northwest of the United States, they erected three monumental “landscape structures,” Domo, Inverted Portal and Beartooth Portal. The exhibited film, reflects the seamless blending of landscape and sculpture, sculpture and architecture evoking natural excrescences as ruins. Literally made of the landscape, meaning made of earth from “Tippet Rise,” the works have been shaped to echo the profiles of the surrounding mountains without completely imitating them, the human touch only subtly present, visible only in the works complex structure and pleated texture of their surfaces. The four concrete tower models, part of the Towers of Landscape series, are 1:1 scale experiments guided by four types of geological developments: Reticulated, Layered, Melted and Excavated Here the architects envision new processes, aggregates of reinforced concrete and earth, with the goal of intensifying the resonance of building with the magic of the land.

(UK)

While playing hide-and-seek in the old city, children access a surprising reality concealed behind the scenes of everyday streets. In a near future heavily influenced by the boom of the Indian subcontinent, digital devices expand the old and traditional city, and reveal unexpected and apparently magic possibilities. While children run along the streets of the old and bustling city they know well, they open smart gateways and modify reality. One of those doors brings them to a cavernous network of hidden and forgotten spaces. Here the border between what is fully natural and what has a kind of mechanical soul is blurred. The two children finally get back to the city, facing the view of its superimposed structures. This short film, conceived by Factory Fifteen and produced by Liam Young, speculates on how technology can enrich our interaction with the city, in a subtle way, starting with a surprising new understanding of its surfaces.

Their movie Chupan Chupai (2014) was developed for the Future Perfect exhibition at the 2013 Architecture Triennale in Lisbon, Portugal.

(Germany, 1977)

The Sleepwalker Archive brings together an eclectic selection of publications covering a variety of disciplines such as art, architecture, urbanism, critical theory, philosophy, psychology, literature and popular culture, into a graphic topography and an installation in space. Plunging into the heart of the realm of dreams, this “Somnambulist Archive” explores strange yet familiar worlds. In this work, Lukas Feireiss selects, archives and compiles ideas using a cut-up technique that allows him to create new and surprising stories: architectural and spatial theories end up cohabiting becoming an integral part of the bandes dessinées (comics); the roots of Western philosophy share a space as much with science fiction as with children’s tales.

(Germany-Mexico, 1915-1990)

Originally from Poland, Mathias Goeritz received a PhD in philosophy and art history in Berlin in 1937. Different voyages throughout Europe during his youth imbued him with the language of the avant-gardes, from Dada to surrealism and expressionism to Bauhaus. In 1940, he moved to Morocco then to Spain in 1945 where he founded the Altamira School in 1948. In 1949, he moved to Mexico and would never leave. Between sculpture and architecture, painting and poetry, philosophy and esthetic critic of the trends of his time, Goeritz established an aesthetic experience based on the necessity for a “spiritual elevation.” In 1952 the “Manifesto of Emotional Architecture,” was one of the first texts theorizing a call to fundamentally overcome the Functionalist precepts. The Experimental Museum ECO (1953), Satellite Towers, 1957 (Collaboration Luis Barragan and Mario Pani), La Ruta de la Amistad [The Road of Friendship] (a city scale circuit of twenty sculptures commissioned for 1968 Olympics in Mexico), Or the Espacio Escultorico (created for the campus of the university of Mexico City, 1978-1981), remain some of Latin America’s most celebrated “architectural-sculpture” projects.

Laurids Ortner, Günter Zamp Kelp, Klaus Pinter et Manfred Ortner (Austria, 1967-1992)

« Pneumacosm est votre propre planète vivante, faite de plastique et travaillant comme une ampoule électrique. Branchezle dans la prise des armatures urbaines existantes et appréciez la vie en trois dimensions, immergé dans l’environnement alentour. Des milliers et des milliers de Pneumacosm forment un nouveau paysage urbain. » (Haus-Rucker-Co) Projet manifeste et fondateur du groupe, imaginé par Günter Zamp Kelp et Manfred Ortner, Pneumacosm (« respiration du cosmos ») est une unité d’habitation en plastique gonflable qui fonctionne comme une ampoule incandescente à l’intérieur d’une structure urbaine verticale. Lorsque cette unité est « branchée » sur la façade du bâtiment, elle est prête à fonctionner. On y entre par les corridors rajoutés sur l’immeuble, et l’intérieur de la sphère se scinde en deux zones : un large espace commun et plusieurs espaces plus petits dédiés à diverses fonctions. Ces petites unités fonctionnelles peuvent être choisies individuellement avant leur installation dans la structure verticale. Ainsi, l’organisation interne de la sphère donne à chacun la possibilité d’une retraite individuelle dans les cellules plus petites, ou d’une vie sociale dans le grand espace commun. Le Pneumacosm est cette peau transparente qui prolonge le corps de l’architecture à celui de la ville, comme un casque. Coeur électrique qui bat, il assure le rythme d’une croissance continue de la ville, mégapole infinie et oppressante.

(Austria, 1934–2014)

Considered one of the forerunners of radical architecture as well as of the postmodern movement, Hans Hollein sees architecture as being both a system of signs and a communications medium, and from the late 1950s on, he established an approach based on collage and the hijacking of images and references. Between 1956 and 1969 Hans Hollein imagined “sculpture cities” in the form of drawings and photomontages which acted as a manifesto against modern functionalism. These “shock images” were contemporary with Pop Art and illustrated his semantic and communicational approach to architectural space. The architect increased the megalithic motifs and the “superstructure” forms which he monumentalized and incorporated in rural and urban landscapes. Somewhere between Primitivism and Expressionist imagination, these city projects deliberately rejected all manner of readability and functionality, and were presented in the opaqueness and compactness of their old-fashioned and disquieting forms: “The building must not reveal its use, it is not the expression of the structure and the construction, nor is it an envelope, or a shelter. 

(Slovakia, 1937-2017)

Based in Bratislava, the Slovakian artist, Jozef Jankovič quickly gained notoriety in the late 1950s, by creating a sculptor style open to architecture and public space. After becoming “undesirable” following the Prague Spring and the implementation of a so-called regime of “normalization,” Jankovič was excluded from the National Artists Union. In 1972 he carried out his initial series of dystopian architectural projects that refer ironically to the beginning of the normalization process in Czechoslovakia. Drawn in black ink on white paper, four views of closed interiors suggest an atmosphere of oppression. The series presents us with places of isolation, torture and interrogation, prison cells or waiting rooms in bureaucratic public administration buildings, where citizens are reduced to numbers. Continuing until 1987, he produced several hundred drawings of urban visions, laced with dry irony and marked by the seal of a totalitarian ideology. Digitally rendered, these drawings also make the artist a pioneer of digital art.

(Brasilia, 1966)

Based in São Paulo (Brazil), Lucia Koch has created ephemeral interventions in both domestic and natural spaces since the beginning of the 1990s. Here, color-filtering gelatin, normally used on cinema sets, cover the glass surfaces in Turbulences hall, plunging visitors into an atmosphere full of color. Each turbulence from the existing architecture is reclassified by a color that takes on a dual-dimension, temporal and emotional, according to the movement of the sun: A dramatic aurora, A twilight hour, A polluted sunset. Lucia Koch’s interventions within the space tend to shift our attention, not necessarily to its contents, but towards its envelope and to question the use of framing employed by the architecture. Looking to materialize an optical separation more than a physical one, the artist varies the colors for each pan, only complicating the vibrations that occur as a response to meteorological events. The changes produced by these colored areas affect more than the building, it also touches the people walking through the colored reflections, an embodiment of the encounter with space.

(Belgium, 1973)

A graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Cédric Libert headed the Anorak agency between 2005 and 2010 before today evolving into an experimental and independent practice of architecture through teaching, writing and curation. His reflections on urban space led him to become interested in the Aérotrain Viaduct designed by Bertin in Orléans, a project from the 1970’s whose vestiges still mark the territory. It provides an aesthetic experience on two scales, the landscape and the infrastructure, through the elaboration of four architectural models and a plaster representing the monorail. The finished epic of the airtrain developed by Jean Bertin is the starting point of a narrative that engages artists, architects, thinkers and the public to take a position in the landscape, to question its existence and form in a Museum structure that continues over 18 km in length, punctuated by three platforms […].” From this intermediate landscape in between two temporalities, two places and two modes between reality and fiction, the Museum of Epics and its potential stories emerge.

Maria Charneco, Alfredo Lérida, Guillermo López et Anna Puigjaner (Spain, 1975, 1975, 1980, 1980)

For MAIO architecture is defined as much by real buildings as by imaginary constructions, both inhabited buildings and projects that were never developed. The representations of architecture, such as plans, sketches, and drawings, waiting patiently for their future transition into constructed matter. These images of architecture can be either real or imaginary elements, like mirages, dreams or Fata Morgana. MAIO pays particular attention to the principle of the library of Babel described by Jorge Luis Borges in the new eponymous, where all books, written or yet to be written, coexist. On their flag, the architects of MAIO imagine an infinite architectural landscape, bringing together possibility, and making all the architectural projects constructed and unconstructed cohabit, given to us here as a parcel.

Beate Hølmebakk et Per Tamsen (Norway, 1963 et 1967)

The narrative and functional approach to architecture, with its specific characters and locations, underlies the work of the Oslo based Norwegian agency Manthey Kula. The installation has been conceived as a landscape depicting the destiny of five historical figures struck by exile and isolation: Grette Aasmundsson from Iceland (XIh century), Dutchman Leendert Hasenbosh (XVIIIth century), Petro Kalnyshevsky from Ukraine (XVIIth century), Amerindian Juana Maria (XIXth century), and Mary Mallon from Ireland (XIXth-XXth century). However, these stories are not illustrative. Instead the architects prefer to work on speculative grounds: What did these characters dream of, what feelings did they experience, what existential questions did they pose? As a response, they have created five small scale singular spaces, each corresponding to the personality of a character: the delinquent, the deviant, the antagonist, the victim and the outcast. Playing dichotomies inside/outside, center/periphery, up/down, etc. they express, above all, the relationships between the lives of users and space. Manthey Kula’s approach doesn’t give priority to predetermined functions, but instead is part of a movement that privileges the invention of multiple narratives that give form to space.

Theodore et Stephen Spyropoulos (USA, 1976, 1980)

Founded in 2002, Minimaforms has developed an experimental architectural practice closely connected with new forms of communication. For the Biennale the agency has created a model of urban development based on the “daily emotional interactions” of individuals. Emotive City captures real-time information flows from social networks and the presence of visitors. The data is defined as an alternative self-management model based on total mobility, redefining the structural organization for collective and relational intelligence. The model consists of twenty clusters that manage and compute the data via a computer program and spherical bots arranged around the model; these are equipped with light sensors and Wifi to interact with the public and transmit the data to the model. The spheres contain microcosms connected to a global network, echoing the utopian language of the visionary town planning from the 1960s (Pneumacosm, Haus-Rucker-Co). The chromatic variations of the model represent its different phases of activity and help to amplify the immersive effect on the visitor. A screen displays the calculation diagrams and transfer operations in real time. tors.

(Nigeria, 1935)

The architect, painter, and sculptor Demas Nwoko has been operating a syncretism in between multiple architectural languages, combining Igbo Nigerian architecture, and Japanese construction techniques, since the 1970s. After studying scenography in Paris Demas Nwoko (Nigéria, 1935) New Culture Studio, 1967 and traveling to Greece, in 1962 he set up his studio in Ibadan in the southwest of Nigeria. New Culture Studio was his first architectural construction. It consists of a residence and production space with an adjacent theater. The building was built with local resources: brick, laterite and granite. Evoking Greek architecture, each entrance presents a covered gallery held up by a colonnade while the theater, a prototype, still under construction, is presented as a semicircular shape at the opening of the zenith. The decorative aspects are expressed by blending patterns from Igbo and Beninese cultures, molded and sculpted in polychrome materials. It was the architect’s first endeavor into researching and developing acoustics, the importance given to water, the modulation of natural light and to the skin of the building. This project, in parallel with post-war European architecture-sculpture, defends a new synthesis of the arts combining scenography, sculpture, design and architecture.

(Spain, 1976)

At the Heart of the Oblique, a Homage to Claude Parent is a musical piece for the piano commissioned by the Concours International de Piano d’Orléans (International Piano Competition of Orléans) for Hèctor Parra, that will be performed for the first time in March of 2018, during the competition at the end of the Biennale. The Spanish composer‘s encounter with the Frac Centre-Val de Loire’s collection was hugely influential as his musical creation is particularly inspired by the fine arts. After being inspired to create a piano solo (2014), based on Gordon Matta- Clark’s piece Office Baroque, it is now Claude Parent and Paul Virilio’s Function of the Oblique that has caught Parra’s attention. In this very virtuous “study” of about fifteen minutes, Parra literally transposes the Sainte-Bernadette-du-Banlay Church (1963- 66) into music. 

(Spain, 1940)

Andrés Perea Ortega developed his first reflections about mobile architecture at the Superior Technical School of Architecture in Madrid, where he taught from 1967. The model for the Móvil Habitable [Movil Habitable] project, developed for a national competition, studies the conditions of absolute mobility, without limits, through which the habitat submits to the desire of the man and not the reverse. The mobile home functions as a “miniature solar system,” with translational and rotational effects allowing variability in how the living spaces are distributed. The different levels of gyrating galleries are accessible from the central core thanks to two entrances, which permit multiple access points to the different living spaces. The core channels the vertical circulations, a spinal column that joins to the ground, making stability, for the moving spaces unstableness. The project is part of European research concerning mobile urban planning and mega structures that join the principles of circulation and modularity developed by architects Loris Rossi or Angela Hareiter.

Ambra Fabi et Giovanni Piovene (Italy, 1981)

Founded in Milan (2013), PIOVENEFABI works as much on architecture as on design, urban planning or on publishing, reconsidering the boundaries between public and private space. Beginning with two reproductions of Andrea Branzi’s Case a pianta centrale (1986- 1987), PIOVENEFABI has invented a typology of domestic spaces organized according to a narrative that freely alludes to the rituals of everyday life. In this narrative, framed around the primordial role that Branzi attributes to objects of the home—for him, architecture has disappeared giving way to our daily lives being organized around the products we use—is added to each collage another architectural reference, famous or forgotten, for example the Domus Aurea in Rome, the Ptolemaion in Samothrace, or the Bazaar of Kashan. These multiple encounters result in sixty images that conserve Branzi’s plastic vocabulary, integrating them as they are, fragmented or altered by their reproduction, of old architectural plans, stripped from their context and moved into an indefinite space. The produced overlaps vary among dreams of space and possible domestic uses, without being strictly determined: only a few clues subtly leading us towards these imaginary habitats.

(France, 1976)

After studying in Paris and Hong Kong, Thomas Raynaud began addressing the question of rehabilitation and landscapes at his agency BuildingBuilding, founded in Paris in 2007. For the Biennale he has focused on Pirou-Plage, a small seaside resort town on the west coast of Cotentin. The seawater pool located in Pirou- Plage, counts amongst these constructions that attract the interest of those that would still seek a more fundamental definition, a more anonymous one too. Standing about a hundred meters from the coast, it is made up of two pools filling up and disappearing with the tides; two rectangles of concrete accessible through steps and ladders and surrounded by two pennants signalling their presence at high tide. We thought we would talk about a swimming pool, but we end up with even less: water impoundment. Neither really a pool nor really nothing… A concrete wall anchored in the sand, anchored in the tides, installed in the sea; at once off and on the shore. A simple partition: inside, a changing condition, at once sign and monument, both a puddle and a pool; outside, the world, the sea, tides, usages, flags, chaos and the possibility of drowning, in a word what we continue to call the outside, the exterior.

(Spain, 1940-2021 ; 1942-2023)

Francisco Javier Seguí de la Riva is considered a key actor of the Center of Computing at the University of Madrid (CCUM), one of the few places for creation and freedom tolerated under the Franco dictatorship. The experimental space developed and financed by IBM operated from 1968 to 1982 and brought together architects, engineers, logisticians, philosophers, poets, painters, etc. around researching “the language of machines” and the forms of creation made possible by automatic calculation. Many of Seguí de la Riva’s works were done in collaboration with Ana Buenaventura. The architect was particularly interested in the definition of primary and basic modules, from which he tried to develop his architecture, as demonstrated, in his formal collages composed of livable units. It was inspired by computational research on the concept of spatial unity led by Ian Moore and Neville Longbone. The definition of these units was then used to study social behavior. The works presented at the Biennale refer to the theme “Archeology of Digital Architecture,” that can be found throughout the Frac Centre-Val de Loire’s collection, notably Jozef Jankovič’s digital drawings, created during the same period, in the totalitarian countries of Eastern European.

(Algeria, 1980)

Massinissa Selmani lives and works in Tours since 2005. His method of working is based on using drawing as a first form of documentation and on exploring the principles of images making and story telling. For the Biennale, he investigates the ability of a model to become a fiction and an archive, before the actual construction of the building. The artist begins with the surprising speculation that has developed on the Internet concerning architectural projects planned in Algeria which are unfinished due to long term delays. 3D models of the projects, official or not, combined with other buildings under construction abroad, form a visual archive, both real, fantasy, and even imaginary. Selmani formalizes this speculative process with an elaborate fictional archive of African based projects, without reveling their contexts. Aiming to deconstruct the architect’s table, the final three models have been placed on sculpture stands or hung on the wall and reference these evolving stories. Selmani juxtaposes and superimposes autonomous fragments – 3D prints, fictitious promotional packages and drawings – on tracing paper or plexiglass that form a counterpoint everyone can decipher.

(Italy, 1917-2007)

Ettore Sottsass has developed a creative practice at the crossroads of art, architecture and design. He is one of the precursors of radical architecture in Italy, a protest movement that attacked the functionalism of the 1960s. This exhibition draws a thread through two of Sottsass iconic projects: the Superbox Armoire series, designed in 1966 at a time when Sottsass was deeply influenced by his journey to India, where he observed color, pattern and ceramics that “give a ritualistic weight to objects.” (“I always thought that design starts where rational processes ends and where those of magic begin.”) With their sculptural geometry and saturated colors, Superboxes are like small altars or totems. Sottsass conceived the photographic series Metafores [Metafors] during his voyages in the desert between 1969 and 1976. The ephemeral structures he created in the landscape before photographing them are made up of inexpensive and fragile elements (twigs, ribbons, leaves, pebbles, etc.), which refer to the precariousness of things. These photographs are part of the “microscopic gestures” and the “elementary actions” that Ettore Sottsass uses to call for a renewal of our relationship between individual and collective space.

Mireia Luzárraga et Alejandro Muiño (Spain)

Embarking on thesis on Ornamental politics and self-sufficient micro-communities, the architects from the Spanish agency Takk (Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño) have developed an experimental practice of architecture at the frontier of nature and artifice.. The Allochtoons Species Project, taking form of two flags and a sculpture, reestablishes a repertoire of vegetables and geological forms passed through a filter of aesthetic pop and caves “rocailles” from the XVIIth century. The installation consists of an entanglement of branches and invasion of exotic flowers that take a metaphorical turn. Deliberately decorative, even kitsch, the project establishes a parallel between the invasion of allochtoon species, foreign to the local ecosystem, and Northern countries efforts to curb immigration by intensifying border controls. Questioning the reproduction of autochtoons to the detriment of hybrid identities, the work aims to reconsider a new ecologic politic for architecture.

(France, 1982)

Graduate of the École Spéciale d’Architecture de Paris in 2007, Max Turnheim currently runs the UHO architecture studio. The work for this particular project is a direct reference to two pieces from the Frac Centre-Val de Loire’s collection: Project Mizoe No. 4 (1993) by Hiromi Fuji and No-Stop City (1969) by Archizoom. The two works share a critique of modernism’s foundations, declaring neutrality as a new condition of architecture and the city. If Fuji takes architecture back to the “zero degree,” Archizoom states it should be eliminated. La Barre reinvestigates the buildings lack of historicity, a collective housing stereotype and the “Métropole diffuse” (dispersed metropolis) by Branzi. For this project, the city essentially becomes a space dedicated to circulation ebbs and flows, modeled on equations describing the fluidity of movement from Navier and Stokes, scientists from the nineteenth century. The light and the changing patterns acting on the shimmering screen dissolve La Barre, or, on the contrary, make it appear as a zone of plausible resistance of domestic space in the face of urban dynamics.

(Spain, 1942)

José María Yturralde joined the Computing Center of the University of Madrid (CCUM) in 1968, where he completed his first works of computational art alongside engineers, architects, artists and computer scientists before joining the Center for Advanced Visual Studies of MIT, between 1974 and 1978. These two experiences predispose him to the combining of the arts and sciences, which continues right through his most recent pictorial research. By the end of the 1960s, he was interested in multidimensional geometry and investigating the limits of pictorial space. Aware of the importance of the success of information technology and information sciences, the artist uses scientific data, which he interprets to make into aesthetic forms, like in the series Impossible Figures. He conceives geometric structures that disrupt our sensory experience and question our perception of space contrained by gravity, and based on vertical and horizontal planes. Since 1978 Yturralde has experimented in 3D using a mental construction of reality to create flying structures and Sky Art. He explores the idea of real landscapes and the environment by taking into account the contributions of Land Art, while associating the idea of an essential geometry with a notion of natural space.

(Germany, 1967)

A graduate of the Berlin University of Art and Design in 1997 in the theory of visual arts, architecture and media, the German artist Annett Zinsmeister has developed since 2000s a practice at the crossroads of art, design and architecture, which questions the history of utopias and spacial ideologies as they were thought and built over the centuries. In her hypnotic installations, the artist covers the walls, floor and ceiling with photographic details of urban or industrial buildings using repetitive motifs printed on wallpaper. The motifs, which she describes as “modules,” enable her to deconstruct and reconstruct space. Gridding the layout, and amplifying the virtual effects of perspective accentuates the project’s dystopian dimension, translating it into a form of counterutopia. Genuine “machines of perception,” these artificial spaces question our understanding of space by disrupting our relationship between interior and exterior, between reality and illusion, between possible and impossible and in that manner reviving radical architecture.

(Mexique, 1972)

After having co-founded the Laboratory for Research on Architecture and Urban Planning in Mexico City (LCM) in 1999, Tatiana Bilbao has been running a studio specialized in housing and sustainable architecture since 2004. Financed by the Mexican government to encourage access to home ownership for low-income families, the project is a response to the alarming shortage of housing in the Latin American country, which has one of the highest rates of population growth. The objective is to create a new type of affordable, qualitative, and sustainable housing that will gradually replace the rudimentary habitations and shantytowns. For most of the two thousand potential buyers interviewed by Bilbao, the stated desire is to build a home resembling “a finished house,” without a flat roof, a sign of precariousness in Mexico. The result is a dual-sloping roof structure that is customizable according to the number of residents and the cultural specifications created by the different climatic conditions, which vary from one end of the country to the other. Starting with a fixed concrete core, each habitant, according to their needs and budget, can organize modules made of wooden pallets, light weight and inexpensive, which can be aligned as closed walls, or open as screens barriers (claustras). There are multiple advantages to this modular system: cost, adaptability, step-by-step development, customization for each home and a living space of over 43 square meters officially guaranteed by the government.

Henri Bony et Léa Mosconi (France, 1987 et 1984)

Architects, researchers and exhibition curators, Henri Bony and Léa Mosconi question the characteristics of modernity by setting up multidisciplinary think-tanks. For the Biennale, the architects have created an installation that brings into perspective the crisis being encountered by humanity during the era of the Anthropocene. A geological period that began with the Industrial Revolution, when human activities begin having a significant impact on the terrestrial ecosystem, combined with Bony and Mosconi’s questioning of modernity. Programed at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, two architects will participate in a duel that looks to articulate the features of the “modern monster.” Jousting over several hours, the performance is accompanied by video interviews of philosophers and historians done in 2017, directed by Bony and Mosconi and including the leading intellect Bruno Latour. The installation is formed by a collection of thoughts brought into play under the gaze of the public eye.

(Russia, 1955)

Artist and architect associated with the “paper architecture” movement that opposed the standardized building in Russia, Alexander Brodsky moved to New York in the 1990s before opening his studio in Moscow. This installation composed of panels of raw clay and this series of engravings and silkscreens borrow from various sources: romantic landscape, genre art and 3D archaeological surveys. Somewhere between formal research on geometric perspective and funny anecdote, Brodsky takes a critical look at modernity in the state of ruin. The materials used reflect the promises on which our cities are based, and their architectural fragility. On the verge of disappearing, the monument, inspired by the coffered vault and central oculus of Rome’s Pantheon, is reduced to the status of sign that literally takes on water. These desolate spaces are as much places of reflection as a philosophical meditation on the end of utopias. They arouse critical affiliations and reason by evoking the theme of the end of history.

(Italy, 1970-1977)

Active between 1970 and 1977, the Italian group Cavart was created in the context of a counter-culture marked by an affirmation of “radical” architectural practices. Cavart developed a critique of capitalism through focusing on ecology, collective action and citizen participation as an “absolute condition” for the reappropriation of social space. Between 1973 and 1975, they carried out a series of interventions in the quarries (in Italian cava) of the region of Padua. This lead to highly acclaimed Séminario Cavart 1975, conceived as a “competition/seminar with the goal of designing an impossible architecture,” it brought together architects, designers, actors and poets in order to generate works destined to “liberate architecture from its constraints” and foster an environment for debate. Between 1974 and 1977, Cavart combined theoretical projects (on “new forms of landscape”), the production of experimental films (Design &cologico or Santa Ecologia Vergine e Martire, which won the Centro Psicografico di Maser prize in 1974) (Prospettiva del 21.mo secolo e Guernica, L’esplorazione del territorio del corpo in Padua or La Balenale for the 1976 Venice Biennale).

(France, 1931-1993)

Chanéac defends an organic, evolutionary and mobile architecture of individual cells. In 1967, he developed the project of Alligator City, which is a principle consisting of raising the street grid to create a space between it and the natural ground. This brings the “entrails” of urban organization into light by raising them off the ground in order to deduce the form and very structure of the city. Attached to large arches that transform the urban landscape into artificial hills, the industrialized plastic cell is the basic unit of a flexible and mobile habitat that becomes open to a relational and organic space. These arches take on a role of an interface, like the pores of the skin. Acting like a reptile, the structure makes it possible to pass from one medium to another. The project was part of an effort to expand architecture into new environments during the 1960s. It is part of what the French critic Michel Ragon called “futuristic urbanism.”

(Italy, 1931-2022)

In the early 1970s, Riccardo Dalisi led a series of “workshops,” on the streets, with children from the working class neighborhood of Traiano in Naples, that activated processes of precarious development through a “poor technique” (Tecnica povera). Architecture is defined as “the experience of space,” in a crisis of the object where only usage and appropriation matters. Dalisi distributed models by his students from architecture school made out of poor materials, to the children, certain illustrating the principles of structural compression or traction behavior. Being a participative instrument the model becomes a tool for an ‘architecture of unpredictability’, an economy of “creative disorder” rooted in the experience itself. These spatial experiments thus embody the quintessence of radical architecture as an ‘architecture of relationships’, between the individual and collective, between the object and its cultural environment, in which theory and praxis are inseparable.

(France, 1928–2005)

Claude Parent sought to redefine our living spaces by building disruptive buildings with sloping floors and walls, in a critical relationship with modern plan, traditionally horizontal. Between 1963 and 1968, within Architecture Principe, he developed with Paul Virilio the theory of the Oblique Function: a new relation to the ground based on instability and dizziness. In 1970, appointed Curator of the French Pavilion of the Venice Biennal of Art, Parent made a large-scale concretization of its inclined ramps systems. Entitled The line of greatest slope, the “practicable” of Venice is a collaborative project whose every step is photographed by Gilles Ehrmann.

A selection of the 282 photographs constitutive of this photographic campaign covers all the walls of the borne, documenting the interventions of artists Bellaguet, Buri, Cousin, Morellet and Mannoni in an experimental and joyful form of synthesis of the arts.

Nicola Delon, Julien Choppin et Sébastien Eymard (Algeria, 1977 - France, 1977 - France, 1973)

The meeting between Patrick Bouchain and Encore Heureux was decisive for the Parisian agency founded by Nicola Delon et Julien Choppin in 2011. Today the two architects are directing a film to better understand the discourse and reflection, at the heart of the architecture Patrick Bouchain’s work. If the syntax of the film evokes the manner Boutang captures Deleuze through the Abécédaire, Encore Heureux’s project is an intimate and complicit dialogue conducted in June of 2014 on a beach in Pas-de-Calais. The interview with Patrick Bouchain reveals the linguistic prowess and sharing in his relationship to architecture. The filmmakers show how “his eloquence makes us want to build and inhabit the complexities of the world without falsely over simplifying them. Speaking with Patrick is like facing an athlete, a boxer who plays with our questions, ducks and weaves, leads us far astray, then concludes following several unexpected twists and turns. It is this powerful rhetoric that lead us to make this film. We want to transmit and share this form of oratorical art, the framework for his architecture. His volubility creates a fascinatingly powerful narrative, and is a very unique way of constructing narratives.”

(Mexico, 1979)

Having established her agency in Mexico City in 2003, Frida Escobedo explores the ambiguities of promises made by architectural modernism during the construction of Mexico’s national identity. For her participation in the Biennale she has examined La Ruta de la Amistad [The Road of Friendship] project, a program of twenty-two public commissions given to international sculptors led by the artist Mathias Goeritz and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez in 1968, to mark the Summer Olympics being held in Mexico City. Frida Escobedo revisits the sixteenth stage of the road, a sculpture by Olivier Seguin. Escobedo’s monumental welded steel installation takes the form of the metal frame from Seguin’s historical piece. The structure testifies to a monumental filiation of modern utopia, from Tatlin to Constant, treated as a “ruin in reverse” (R. Smithson, 1967): the elevation of a building in ruins even before its completion. The Ruta de la Amistad constitutes for the architect a historical tipping point where hope meets the end of utopias.

(France, 1968)

Head of the Parisian Architecture firm Mésarchitecture, with Pascal Mazoyer, since 2001, Didier Faustino builds collaborative spaces for reflection at the frontier of architecture, installation, and performance. Defining three possible typologies of Tomorrow’s shelter, Didier Faustino’s project scripts possible scenarios following a catastrophe due to global warming and the rise of sea waters, which transform the landscape as much as our society. In-between paranoia and a hope for alternative solutions, the architect offers three modules each composed of two parts: solid volumes of concert corresponding to individual living spaces, with large metal platforms hung between or around them as dedicated public spaces. This configuration contrasts the image of a hyperprotective bunker with bare trusses above the ground, expressing how an architectural form can adapt to a mutating environment: as the water rises only the platforms will emerge while the inferior elements will remain submerged. This project embodies the vision of an architect facing a world, which from now on can only think of itself in terms of communal strength: the metaphor here being us coming together above the water in order to survive.

Gian Piero Frassinelli, Vierwindehuis , Amsterdam, Pays-bas, 1983-1990. Courtesy Gian Piero Frassinelli (Italy, 1939)

A member of the Italian radical architecture collective Superstudio since 1968, Gian Piero Frassinelli lead a professional career until 2003. As an anthropology teacher he approaches architecture as a social endeavor. For the Biennale he has written a narrative applying the real and the present to science fiction and the virtual, meditation on the future of Mankind. An oneiric drifting that blurs the structure of lecture and space-time; this unpublished text is as much in the tradition of a philosophical tale of Enlightenment as in the radical practice of fiction opened by the tales of the Twelve Ideal Cities (1971). Based on intertextuality, this méta-narrative pays tribute to historical figures such as Ettore Sottsass or Louis XVI.

(Germany, 1928-2008)

Graduating in 1955 Günter Günschel, a German architect, delved very early on in his research into innovative forms of construction and the morphology of spatial structures. Like Robert Le Ricolais or Buckminster Fuller, Günschel pursued a dream of light and flexible architecture, freed from reality’s contingencies, appearing in innumerable drawings that crossed the rigor of an engineer with the expressiveness of an artist. The composite geodesic systems he studied beginning in the 1950s for vaulted or suspended ceilings radically opened up new perspectives for architecture and urbanism. He also created freely drawn ink landscapes on proliferating across sheets of paper –with multiple facets derived from an icosahedron– contaminating nature until ultimately hybridizing with it. During a project that called for the redeveloping of an island on the Weser River near Bremen, Günschel superimposed, via a potent composition, these geometrical systems to the formations of vegetation.

(Switzerland, 1936–2011)

Architect, polymorphic creator and musician, Pascal Häusermann defended for more than fifty years, modularity in architecture and the free expression of the individual. Patrick Antoine commissioned, The Movable Theater, a project for his troupe of about twenty actors, that was designed to float on Lake Geneva and provide performances in Geneva, Lausanne, Evian… The Movable Theater consisted of two double spheres placed two meters fifty off the ground. Their armature consisted of metal tubes nested within one another, and covered with an opaque plastic wing. The principal sphere, seventeen meters high, housed the theater, galleries, a barfoyer and entrances. The second, fifteen meters high, contained the stage. Around the spheres, a vacuum of two meters fifty allowed the actors and technicians to move around; twelve cardboard cells, orbiting the spheres, served as the dressing rooms. The public could be seated in the center in circular bathtubs that were detachable allowing nineteen different configurations for watching the show. Built in Thonon, The Movable Theater was transported and mounted for performances in Saint-Herblain, then in Courbevoie before being destroyed after the loss of Patrick Antoine and the separation of the troupe, in 1971.

(Palestine & Jordania, 1980)

The work of Palestinian-Jordanian architect and artist Saba Innab questions the genesis and terrible consequences of the deterritorialization of Palestinians forced to live in refugee camps. The historical origin of refuges and exile, or the moment when the Palestinians were uprooted from their land, precisely coincided with the emergence of modernity in the Middle East, a specifically Western modernity that, with its concept of a Nation State, authoritatively imposed itself on this region of the world. Saba Innab’s projects play on a series of dialectical oppositions: built on land that is not his, moved to a land of exile, theoretically provisionary, to a perennial encampment where you are born and where you will die, literally no mans land. In a series of seven models Saba Innab deconstructs and exacerbates the effectiveness by which modern architecture uproots people definitively depriving them of their “poetic home.” Made of noble and resistant materials, the opposite of materials used in the refuge camps, showcasing a frightening display of modernism, opposing the wall that divides to the hole we are buried in, multiplying the gates, the monumental shadows and silhouettes definitively banning these landless populations.

(Lebanon, 1968)

Lebanese architect based in Beirut, co-curator and architect of the Bahrain pavilion for the XIVth Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2014, Bernard Khoury designs rethink the link between the inhabitants and the environment of their building. The installation In Order of Appearance brings together a hundred photographs showcasing projects from the architect. The environment presents itself as a network of connections reveling a profound dynamic that draws a complex cartography. Sixteen hanging boxes within the space each broadcast a story told by the architect. Each subjective narrative evokes a “protagonist,” someone with whom Khoury has had a relationship with during the development of a project. An advocate for a narrative approach to architecture, intermingling possible narratives as the viewer wonders and helps to trace a path, Bernard Khoury brings new encounters which, often contradictory, favor the expression of a polysemic world.

(Italy, 1938)

Ugo La Pietra, an artiste, architect and designer, was a major figure on the Italian radical scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Urban zones are the focus of his attention: equipped with “deciphering tools,” he surveyed the city down to its tiniest interstices in a quest for “degrees of liberty.” The artist methodically reappropriates and reinterprets urban space utilizing photography, film, drawing and photomontage. Ugo La Pietra began noticing “spontaneous” creations produced by the inhabitants of the Milanese periphery. Breaking with their previous usage, the objects had been salvaged and repurposed by “do-ityourselfers”, becoming the raw material for their new makeshift constructions. According to the artist, this is the reappropriation of urban spaces, revealing the irrepressible human desire to possess, create and invent. 

Ido Avissar (France, 1972)

Refusing to limit itself to a fixed disciplinary framework, the Parisian agency LIST, created in 2012 by Ido Avissar, approaches architecture in a transdisciplinary manner. In Gray Corridor the agency has created, a narrow semi-circular corridor allowing only one person to pass at a time, a spatial sequence, punctuated with a few different sized images and objects positioned with no hierarchy at different heights: two models of a house, a large drawing, an exaggeratedly long subdivided plan, a piece of red furniture, an oversized walkway, a window. The origin of the elements is from a dialogue established with the work, Project for an Architecture Pavilion (2000, collection of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire) by Mathieu Mercier, which LIST envisages through a report of analogies. In Gray Corridor, opposing scales, and the porosity between architecture, design and art, become a sequence of objects that by conserving their autonomy feel like they are in a dream, updating an operating procedure that places all of the importance on associations.

(Spain, 1981)

Nature is the main source of inspiration for the architect, designer and researcher María Mallo. Since obtaining her PhD in the study of radiolarians, microscopic unicellular marine organisms, she has designed complex geometrical biomimetic structures, from jewelry to architecture and furniture. In a filiation of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, Frei Otto’s light structures or the triaxial networks from Robert Le Ricolais, her buildings exploit geometry present in nature and adhere to bioclimatic requirements. Inspired by radiolaires, Supercluster takes the form of an evolutionary installation whose apparent irregularities corresponds to logical principles, with the forms that compose it referring to the laws of the natural world. A kind of performative matrix it is capable of deforming according to the people suspended inside it, creating an interactivity between the object and the user.
Architect, designer and researcher, María Mallo consecrated her thesis to studying radiolaria, microscopic unicellular marine organisms. Deploying a multi scale organic vocabulary, from jewelry to architecture, she has been inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s biological forms from the 19th century, observations of soap bubbles and crystals by Robert Le Ricolais concerning the notion of automorphism, and the natural growth of form during the 1930’s.

Mariabruna Fabrizi et Fosco Lucarelli (France, 1982 et 1981)

Based in Paris and co-founded by Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli, the agency MICROCITIES, in addition to their architectural practice, has developed Socks, a digital publishing platform/online magazine, in the form of a visual atlas. For the Biennale, MICROCITIES has redrawn the Frac Centre- Val de Loire’s collection by replicating sixteen of the collection’s most emblematic models: Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Rossi, Superstudio, SANAA, Hiromi Fuji, Claude Parent, etc. Each piece has been chosen for its abstract traits and capacity not to express the personality of the author, qualities the agency amplifies through simplifying the projects’ original forms. Against the notion of creation being an individual and isolated act, MICROCITIES asserts that cultural environment plays a major role in producing mental landscapes appropriated by architects. Organized around the notions of archetype, territory, nature, memory or modernity, the sixteen replicas give shape to a new field that, during the process of cataloging and then transmission, identifies the very basis for the act of creating. The project seeks to demonstrate how we integrate common knowledge as to reinvent it.

(Spain, 1939)

Simultaneously a painter and architect, Juan Navarro Baldeweg was invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston as a resident artist in 1971, where he made photomontages and drawings on photos. The Spanish architect studied the possibility of recreating different terrestrial ecosystems within large pneumatic structures that could drift throughout all the regions of the world. His research and development has created climate controlled artificial environments, with his projects taking into account newly available technology and tools. The projects’ drawings focus particular attention on the potential for the diffraction of the light spectrum through an inflatable bubble membrane, which re-characterize the environment by color. Much like other architects of the period, Baldeweg applied his new form of urbanism to the city of New York, the iconic capital of the twentieth century. His alternative proposals prolong the projects of the American Buckminster Fuller and the Viennese architectural group Haus-Rucker- Co who rethought the equilibrium of the Earth by postulating a symbiotic relationship between Man and Nature.

Jennifer Lee et Pablo Castro (USA, 1969, 1959)

Awarded Seoul’s Seim’s Kim Swoo Geun Preview Prize in 2014, New York-based OBRA was founded by Jennifer Lee and Pablo Castro. OBRA’s practice avoids developing a “personal architectural language” instead favoring an analysis of our word as a subject of study and of creation. From this perspective, OBRA conceives the discipline of architecture as a quest for anonymity, in contrast to an artistic gesture that values the individuality of the creator. For the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans they have created a pavilion drawn from an elementary geometric form, universal, public and open to all. Inside the hexagon pavilion images scroll across each of the sides becoming windows with views of landscapes. The rigorous structures that make up the screens are in direct confrontation with the elusive images being diffused. It is at the heart of paradoxes that OBRA commits itself to search the word, without naivety.

(Spain, 1981)

Spanish architect and researcher Ana Peñalba considers the creation and construction process as a collaborative action, an indispensable condition, according to her, for developing habitable and sustainable cities. She is convinced that we must stop destroying in favor of giving more importance to what already exists, her work uses the assembly of existing forms and objects that she re-assigns to invent new structures. In 2016, during her residency at RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency), in Philadelphia, she imagined ten installations replicating the city’s iconic architecture made from garbage. For her participation in the Biennale, Ana Peñalba has continued this project moving her work into the public space of Orléans as a flag convoking the universe of recycling: photomontage of elements created as a result of her work during her residency. This piece, which inspired Peñalba to invent new collaborative architectural protocols, features similarities to the use of misappropriation defended by Ricardo Dalisi, Gianni Pettena or Guy Rottier.

(France)

PEROU defines itself as a research-action laboratory for the hostile city, designed to combine social and architectural action, serving the “multitude of undesirables, commonly recognized as welfare cases or racially separate, but never considered as full-fledged citizens.” In the shantytowns and refuges of Calais, Paris, Arles or Avignon, PEROU designs vivid lively architecture, both physical and immaterial, magnifying the inventiveness and buildings within these multiple confines. Thus bring into light a secondary territory, absent from legal representation and formed by gestures, or acts of hospitality. Following two years of research in Calais, PEROU has instituted the 36 001st commune of France, with what it calls an “investigative work” regrouping the “evidence” gathered in Calais. Simultaneously constituted of memories and memories yet to be constituted, this archive of a commune in the making calls for the reinvention of how we imagine hospitality.

(Spain, 1938-2021)

Trained in architecture at the The Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, José Miguel de Prada Poole obtained his thesis in 1979 (Urban Planning and Prefabrication). He quickly became interested in modular and removable architecture and actively participated in the development of light and pneumatic structures in Spain. He designs experimental projects using recycled industrial materials such as plastic or synthetic textiles. He gained notoriety for creating ambitious projects such as Instant City, an ephemeral city prototype, and Heliotrón, an inflatable sports complex: the first large pneumatic domes constructed in Spain at the time. The experimentation of a mobile and ephemeral architecture is opposed to the clichés of standard architecture. Prada Poole proposes architecture as a sensitive organism, a ductile extension of its inhabitants where the construction interacts with the surrounding environment. The architect’s projects thus makes possible the creation of living spaces in extreme landscapes (Milky Way in outer space or a Hotel in Abu Dhabi in the desert). His research has transcribed, in real time, the most innovative contributions that were emerging in the international panorama, such as those of the American Radical group Ant Farm and their use of technology or their relationship with the environment.

(Sumatra & France, 1922 - 2013)

The Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans is paying tribute to one of the most original artistic and architectural figures from the second half of the XXth century: Guy Rottier. Bringing together more than one hundred and fifty drawings, photographs and models preserved by the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, this exhibition is the most important retrospective ever devoted to the architect. It is a testament to the important relationship between Guy Rottier and this institution, which for more than twenty years has been working towards the dissemination and international recognition of this unusual personality. This exhibition also has the value of a manifest. By following in the wake of an open art work, mutating and poaching to begin his new trek, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire traces a line running through the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléan: that of wandering. Featuring a truly unique style, fuliginous and uncompromising, Guy Rottier intended to radically change the architectural language as well as our modes of living in it.

(France, 1927)

The work and evolution of the artist Olivier Seguin correspond strongly with the themes structuring the “art and architecture” collection of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire: his life as geographic and disciplinary migration, his architecture-sculpture as a program, his experiments toward a synthesis of the arts in Morocco with the architect Jean- François Zevaco and in Mexico, where he lived from 1959 to 1972 and where he realized many monumental public sculptures. The expressivity of Olivier Seguin’s monoliths evoke the primitive forms that the Viennese architect Hans Hollein was drawing during the same period after his return from Mexico (1958- 1959) which are so many illustrations of an architecture that has been emancipated from functionalist dogmas, which moves toward capturing emotion and the power of the human spirit. The Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans highlights these lines of influence while celebrating Olivier Seguin’s contribution to the legendary project La Ruta de la Amistad [The Road of Friendship]. This project united twenty-two international sculptors who had been invited to produce monumental artworks for the Mexico City Olympic Games under the direction of Mathia Goeritz. In Orléans, the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo makes homage to the French contribution, by reproducing the metallic structure of Seguin’s concrete megaliths. By doing this, she is “walking in the sculptor’s dreams,” she unpacks a questioning of the limits and ends of utopias.

(Italy, 1960)

Founder of SERVéN in 1994, the Italian architect Beniamino Servino studied monumentality in architecture in the context of a “post-ecological” city. The drawings he does on paper, newspaper or pages of books are sketches of utopian projects looking to renew the urban and rural landscape that he finds to be desolate. Inspired by existing photographs, the architect begins with a collage of visual and typographical elements. The sheets draw from a repertoire of towers simultaneously evoking both, medieval urbanism, and modernist architecture. Visual elements on signs mark the authority of the city (Castles, cathedrals or steeples), symbols of human ambition (the tower of Babel) and modern infrastructure (water towers, telecommunications antennas), all of the opening the imagination. Progressively dematerialized by colors and transparent nuances, the structures reveal the texts that constitute them, intermingling epochs in the manner of a palimpsest.

(Hungary, 1923 – France, 2001)

Pierre Székely settled in France in 1946. In 1953, he won the prize for the Espace Group competition and in 1965 he joined the GIAP (Groupe International d’Architecture Prospective), created by Michel Ragon. He designed and built several dwellings (Le Bateau ivre, Saint-Marcellin (1952-56…) as well as numerous leisure infrastructures (Village de vacances Renoveau, Beg Meil, 1964-1966), and cultural and religious projects (Eglise du Carmel, Saint-Saulve, 1963-66…). In 1991 an outdoor museum was opened in Pécs (Hungary) devoted to Pierre Székely’s œuvre.

(Austria, 1945)

Any installation, performance and circuit organized by the Austrian artist Mario Terzic can be conceived as the vehicle of an inner journey “to the center of the ego,” and consequently represents a “system of extension” of human innerness. His first works, in the 1970s, indicated a fascination for the Baroque, Antiquity and mythology. They represented the artist’s body as the instrument which made it possible not only to experience space but also to rethink the classical heritage. My Wings, presents Mario Terzic himself in a performance in which he mimes an attempt to fly, but the movement holds out no hope that the man will ever take off: it refers more to the fall of the American soldier in the propaganda poster “Why?” (which had a lot of media coverage in the 1970s) than to the lightness of a body freed from gravity. It is an allegorical, Baudelairean work expressing the hope of a man who, filled with the dream of Icarus, tries to escape from a battlefield which reminds Daedalus’ infernal labyrinth. My Wings also conjures up the figure of the angel and Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines, and echoes the contemporary works of Rebecca Horn, Panamarenko and Gino de Dominicis. It questions the place of the body in space and in the world, a line of thought which here takes on the dimension of a mystical quest.

(Spain, 1978)

In the short film Ensayo Sobre la Ruina, 2012, the artist Luis Urculo questions the idea of progress by offering an essay about the instability and decay of constructions. Different scenes, though similar in their layout and overall condition, appear one after the other. In front of the camera, in an abstracted white set, rough materials and objects give life to a labile configuration that slowly decays for apparently no reason. Adverse forces are quite hidden. The reiteration of the same act suggests a comparison between the scenes. While the action is constant, results are various and depend on gravity and forces, on materials and shapes. The noise of the crash and the time it takes for it to occur change constantly. And finally the objects stand in their collapsed configuration, which still retains traces of the original one.

(China, 1983)

After studying graphism, Mengzhi Zheng attended the Villa Arson in Nice, from 2006 through 2011, where he moved from drawing into 3d volume. Les Maquettes abandonnées [Abandoned Mock-ups] are specially designed sketches: they retain the speed of a graphic gesture, and an automatic nature materialized by a mikado arrangement of wood pieces, cardboard, and paper. These “Inarchitectures,” “uninhabited spaces”, or “nonfunctional spaces,” as defined by the artist, aren’t_intended to be occupied, they’re not scaled down models of future buildings. If they evoke ruins or incompleteness, if they lead the imagination to construct catastrophic scenarios from the past or if they recall huts made out of thin air, they are abandoned only because the exist in between drawing and volume, in the progression from one to the other. These sketches are the foundation of a mental projection scrupulously hung on the wall at eye level, presented frontally and in close quarters encouraging a visual exploration of the little structures, becoming inhabited only for just an instant.

Pier Schneider et François Wunschel (France, 1976 et 1978)

1024 architecture is an artistic label created in Paris (2007) by François Wunschel and Pier Schneider. Their nomadic, temporary and airy architectural projects have been seen throughout the world, from Vancouver to Tokyo, via New York, Montreal, Shanghai and Mexico City. Invited to create a bookstore/cafeteria for the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans, the agency has created a welcoming and life center designed to guide visitors on their itinerary called L’Atelier. Via an architectural and sculptural installation a single space to address the specific needs of the event is created. Consisting of basic raw materials, such as wood boards, scaffolding collars, or spotlights, L’Atelier evokes a world under construction, a place in the making. A meeting point that invites visitors to relax, exchange, converse, read and escape, L’Atelier transforms itself into another space for manufacturing possibilities within the Biennale.