Festival des Architectures Vives in Montpellier, 13–17 June 2012
As every year, the Association Champ Libre is organising the Festival des Architectures Vives. The seventh edition takes place in Montpellier from 13 to 17 June 2012, and the theme is surprise. Around ten installations, free to visit, are located in hôtels particuliers (historic townhouses) that open their doors for the occasion. The festival is a chance to showcase young architects from France and abroad. Discover below the projects selected from the hundred or so submitted:
Invitation à la Lévitation / Mathieu Collos, Cyril Rheims, France
Cyril Rheims and Mathieu Collos, both DPLG-qualified architects, produce projects that straddle architecture, design and art installation. Cyril specialises in making the most of small spaces and works mainly on the reconfiguration of small Parisian apartments. Mathieu now works for a Montpellier practice, while indulging his taste for artistic diversity by developing design and micro-architecture projects on the side.
Visitors enter the courtyard of the hôtel particulier. Before them floats an object steeped in history, closely related to the architectural style of the building. As they begin their visit, the building suddenly fractures, the architectural elements come apart and the spectator discovers the illusion.
Reframe / Pierre Berthelomeau, Adam Scales, Paul Van Der Berg, Netherlands
Adam, Paul and Pierre met while working together at ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles) in Rotterdam. Adam and Paul set up their own architecture practice in Rotterdam under the name Paul Scales. Pierre formed a collective in France under the name Atelier Kit.
At first glance, 'Reframe' appears to be a simple, beautiful object that reflects the façades of the hôtel particulier. As you move around the cube, a series of constantly shifting visual effects is revealed. At one moment 'Reframe' is a cube, then a series of plates, then it disappears. At another, it focuses on details of the surrounding walls. A dynamic that is at once poetic and sensitive develops between contemporary and heritage architecture.
Smooth Rock / MN-Lab, France
MN-Lab is an architecture laboratory dreamt up by the architects Gwénolé Mary and Arnaud Nègre. After varied careers in France and abroad, they are now pooling their skills and embarking on the adventure together once more for the 2012 festival.
Parachuted into an eighteenth-century courtyard, the object disturbs, surprises and provokes the classical architecture. A white monolith. A blue fissure, visible from afar; as you approach, a gentle inner world of curves, as if shaped by the wind, comes into view. It is a sensory experience, lived both up close and at a distance. As you move, the organic undulations arouse interest and surprise.
Cité surprise cité surprenante / tri-Oh! ateliers, Spain – France
Since 2008, Tri-oh! Ateliers has developed and championed diversity, drawing on the personal backgrounds of Javier Pena Ibanez and Cristina Sanchez Algarra: urban planning, landscape architecture, video art, photography and architecture. The collective was born of their meeting at the national school of architecture in Madrid.
Cité surprise, cité surprenante is an installation that changes the way we see Montpellier. Boxes invade the courtyard of the hôtel and await us with their surprises. We stroll around them, step inside and hide within. The boxes then become kaleidoscopes, with surprising views of the courtyard, the sky and the other visitors... Open your eyes.
Topographie de la surprise / UrbanB’s, Switzerland – Italy – Canada
The four members of UrbanB's met in 2007 while studying in Milan. After jointly winning first prize in an ideas competition for a public square in Italy that same year, they decided to carry on working together, drawing on their multicultural make-up and their shared interest in architecture and urban planning.
Giving three-dimensional qualities to something as intangible as surprise brings us close to the ethereal. Surprise is like a pause in our daily lives, where time creates space: a moment of ecstasy that makes room. In our imagination, we see surprise as floating particles that live in our environment and ask to be revealed by our senses. Isn't surprise a natural thing?
Bye-bye Ballon / Shalumo, France
Two young architects met at the ENSAP in Bordeaux, from which they graduated in 2007. From the private house to institutional commissions, from sports facilities to performance venues, from the refurbishment of historic buildings to large-scale urban schemes, their horizons keep widening.
The installation stimulates the senses and multiplies experiences. Visitors engage with it on the move, standing still, and looking up from below in the courtyard. They are invited to interact with it by detaching and appropriating one of the architectural elements, or simply by releasing it, at certain times of day. The visitor is thus active, then passive and observant. They carve out their own space in which they can move forward, sit and even lie down.
Ne dérange pas mes cercles / Julie Biron, Germany
Julie Biron is an independent architect based in Berlin and a graduate of the École d'architecture de Nantes. Her approach is to develop meaningful concepts that reveal and enhance spaces, and to design architecture that is sensitive, legible and easy to understand.
The principle of the installation is to create a visual illusion in which the surface appears static, like the courtyard that surrounds it. Yet when visitors venture to walk across it, it begins to move. The medium of the 'surface' invites a reading of the courtyard as a 'pool'. The metaphor continues in the fluid, shifting properties of the surface, which remind us that an order that seems dense and complex at first glance rests on a fragile balance that is all too easily disturbed.
Tournearound / Dondecabentres, Spain
As the saying goes, 'never two without three', and when there are three of us, everything works. We are three architects, and we see ourselves as much as three independent individuals as a group; each brings his own added value. We see architecture as a palindrome, a project in perpetual evolution, with as many possible steps back as there are mutations – in other words, it can be infinite.
The aim is to make visible what was not visible before. A chance to see the courtyard as it is, but also as a reflection. Like a kaleidoscope, which allows us to see the reality of fantasy and imagination.
Le renversement du ciel / Le Bureau des Affaires Scéniques, France
Le Bureau des Affaires Scéniques, founded in 2011, was born of an encounter between a graphic design agency, the Bureau des Affaires Graphiques, and an architect, Domnine Jobelot. Together, in a transdisciplinary spirit and alongside their professional careers, they share a desire to combine graphic design, multimedia arts, music and even literature in the service of urban planning, architecture and the stage.
Space is thus turned upside down, provoking new spatial sensations. A contemporary canopy slips into the courtyard, revisiting the façade, upsetting the codes of the architecture of the past and of gravity, deceiving us and drawing us into an astonishing loop.
Forêt urbaine / Aa64, United States
Atelier Architecture 64 (AA64), based in New York, is an architecture practice founded in 2003 by Phillip Anzalone and Stéphanie Bayard, specialising in design, digital fabrication, and the use of new materials and technologies. AA64's output is wide-ranging, from the design of furniture and structures to the redevelopment of city centres.
Playing with wind, sun and shadow, the articulated elements of the structure oscillate and the panels cast their shades onto the courtyard walls. The changing light over the course of the day affects the installation and constantly renews the place.
Première neige / École d’architecture de Laval, Canada
At each edition, a university is invited to take part in the Festival des Architectures Vives. For the seventh edition, Université Laval in Quebec joins the festival, represented by three assistants, Marianne Charbonneau, Étienne Bernier and Jean-Philippe Saucier, and four students, Émilie Benoît Beaulé, Alexandre Boulianne, Jean-François Laroche and Éric Lizotte, together known as the Collectif de la Fourchette.
The Collectif de la Fourchette creates this surprise in a Montpellier courtyard by recreating the dazzle of a white blanket of snow. Gaps of light then encourage visitors to emerge from the storm. Dazzled and surprised by the winter whiteness, they discover a transformed courtyard, in which the beauty of its architecture and its opening to the sky are showcased. Seen from above, the courtyard is covered by a blanket of snow from which visitors' heads poke out.
Practical information:
- Dates: 13 to 17 June 2012
- Location: Montpellier (34), France
- Opening hours: 9am to 7pm
- Admission: free
- Organiser: Association Champ Libre
