----------Experimental
architecture, 1950-2002
----------An architecture laboratory:
around ArchiLab
----------Radical Italy
----------Eilfried Huth Günther
Domenig
----------Dominique Perrault : Bibliothèque
Nationale de France/French National Library.
ArchiLab
2003
5th Orléans International Architectural Conference
And part of the celebration of 20 years of Regional Contemporary Art Funds
[FRAC]
The ArchiLab Conference has been produced by the City of Orléans, in collaboration with the FRAC centre, from 1999 on. Every year since, it has been the rendez-vous for forward-looking architecture at an international level. ArchiLab champions a pluralist approach, is open to all manner of innovative tendency, and acts as a venue for discovering architecture in its most creative dimension. ArchiLab's aim is to offer a platform for encounters between French and foreign architects, and between architects and developers. Since its inception, this conference has been roundly acclaimed both nationally and internationally.
This year, five venues (Subsistances militaires, FRAC Centre, Orléans
MultiMedia Centre, Museum of Fine Art, Saint-Pierre Le Puellier Collegiate
Church) will present the FRAC Centre architecture collections. This outstanding
display will be part of the celebration of 20 years of FRACs (Visual Arts
Department, Ministry of Culture and Communications). To mark this event,
the HYX publishing house in Orléans is co-publishing with the FRAC
Centre a catalogue raisonné of these architecture collections:
Architectures expérimentales 1950-2002. 10 ans de collection
du FRAC Centre (528 p., HYX, Orléans, 2003).
Since 1991 the FRAC Centre has been putting contemporary art and research architecture together in one and the same collection, spanning the period from the 1950s to the present day. Architecture features in its critical dimension, demonstrating its power of anticipation and utopia. The FRAC Centre collection is focused around innovative experimental procedures applying to the constructed space, combining artists' works and architects' projects around the notion of "project", where drawings and models rub shoulders with the exploratory phases of the artistic approach. This collection, which now includes some 500 maquettes and 10,000 architects' drawings, encompasses projects symbolizing international contemporary architecture over the past 50 years. It also includes architects' collections (Ionel Schein, Claude Parent, Ricardo Porro, Pascal Häusermann, Chanéac, David Georges Emmerich, Jean-François Zevaco, etc.).
ArchiLab 2003 is also proposing two days of meetings: round tables attended by some thirty architects who have taken part in previous ArchiLab conferences; and lectures by leading figures in the world of architecture.
EXHIBITIONS
FRAC Centre : 1992-2002,
dix ans de collection d'architecture
Curator: Marie-Ange Brayer, Director, FRAC Centre
General coordination : FRAC Centre
This year, the FRAC Centre is displaying its collection in five exhibitions in Orléans. This collection, which is one of a kind, is constructed on notions of utopia and experimentation in architecture, bringing together symbolic projects ranging from the radical architecture of the 1960s to the very latest works. Through its forward-looking dimension, the FRAC Centre collection comes across as a store of ideas about tomorrow's architecture. It is an open-minded forum for reflection, questioning architectural design processes. This collection embraces an architecture with a broad field of reference, involved in permanently challenging its at once creative and critical praxis.
Experimental
architecture, 1950-2002
FRAC Centre collection
from 11 June to 12 October 2003 (closed in August)
Opening: 10 June 2003.
Site des Subsistances militaires, Orléans
In a venue of more than 16,000 sq ft, at the Subsistances, the FRAC Centre offers a tour through its collection. Some 200 models and maquettes and 400 drawings will be on view. The exhibition starts in the 1950s with Constant and the Espace group in France, exploring a new form of artistic synthesis. The most forward-looking and radical experiments of the 1960s are displayed by way of major projects in the history of architecture, from the Haus-Rucker-Co Pneumacosm to David Greene's Living Pod. There is an overview of urban utopias, from Yona Friedman's "spatial cities" to Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York; from the megastructures of the 1960s to the urban projects of Asymptote produced in the late 1980s. Architecture "breaks down" into cells, ramifies as biological bodies, and deconstructs itself in writing (Open House, Coop Himmelb(l)au); it is disseminated in grids (Parc de la Villette, Tschumi), or erected as an eclectic corpus (Graves).
FRAC
Centre contact : Sophie Bellé
Tel : 00 33 (0)2 38 62 52 00
@ : sophiebelle@frac-centre.asso.fr
ArchiLab
contact, site des Subsistances militaires : Christelle Lecoeur
Tel : 00 33 (0)2 38 53 06 16
@ : contact@archilab.org
An
architecture laboratory: around ArchiLab
FRAC Centre collection
from 12 June to 15 September 2003
Opening: 11 June 2003
St Pierre de Puellier Collegiate Church, Orléans
Over the past ten years, the FRAC Centre has purchased many projects by young international teams of architects, in particular by way of the different ArchiLab conferences (4 in all so far, from 1999-2002). A hundred or so projects, produced by some 40 different teams, will be presented, describing today's most forward-looking areas of research.
FRAC
Centre contact : Sophie Bellé
Tel : 02 38 62 52 00
@ : sophiebelle@frac-centre.asso.fr
St Pierre de Puellier contact : T : 00 33 (0)2 38 79 24 85
Radical
Italy
FRAC Centre Collection
from 12 June to 12 October 2003 (closed in August)
Opening: 11 June 2003
FRAC Centre
In the late 1960s, Florence was the cradle of radial Italian architecture. At that time its protagonists embarked on a challenge to the very identity of architecture, which became a conceptual activity, capable of incorporating the other visual arts. This exhibition presents two essential projects to do with city, grid and the disappearance of architecture: Superstudio's "Architectural Histogrammes" and "No-Stop City" by Archizoom. The provocative, ironical and caustic proposals put forward by Superstudio, Archizoom, UFO, Franco Raggi, Andrea Branzi and Giani Pettena get to grips with architecture as an "art of constructing".
FRAC
Centre contact : Sophie Bellé
Tel : 00 33 (0)2 38 62 52 00
@ : sophiebelle@frac-centre.asso.fr
Eilfried
Huth Günther Domenig
FRAC Centre Collection
from 13 June to 21 September 2003
Opening: 12 June 2003.
Museum of Fine Art, Orléans
This monographic exhibition of the architects Günther Domenig (1934) and Eilfried Huth (1930), working at Graz in Austria, will, for the first time, present a unique series of drawings, maquettes and installations of historic projects within the European context of radical architecture in the 1960s (the Ragnitz megastructure; the biomorphic explorations of Floraskin; the Medium Total environmental installation). These architects developed spatial experiments, turning architecture into environment. In their experiments, architecture took on the form of a living and biological organism, in perpetual mutation (Floraskin), in which "proliferating" cells fan out through megastructures (Ragnitz).
FRAC
Centre contact : Sophie Bellé
Tel : 02 38 62 52 00
@ : sophiebelle@frac-centre.asso.fr
Museum of Fine Art contact : T : 00 33 (0)2 38 79 21 83
Dominique
Perrault : Bibliothèque Nationale de France/French National Library.
FRAC Centre Collection
from 13 June to 6 September 2003
Opening: 12 June 2003
Orléans MultiMedia Centre/Médiathèque
In 1989, Dominique Perrault (1953) won the international competition launched by François Mitterrand for the new French National Library. This exhibition retraces the genesis of this project, one of the most radical to be built in France, through maquettes and drawings. The tremendous amount of graphic and illustrative research undertaken by the architect in his sketchbooks attests to the great complexity of the aesthetic and historical fields of reference involved, and follows the long path of spatial exploration around the notion of void and presence/absence.
FRAC
Centre contact : Sophie Bellé
Tel : 02 38 62 52 00
@ : sophiebelle@frac-centre.asso.fr
Médiathèque contact : T : 00 33 (0)2 38 65 45 45