Vieillecroze architecture firm

My Dear Anthony, You asked me what could be the relationship between Architecture, Environment and Art… What a question! 100 pages would not be enough. So here is a too short and modest answer.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (Director of the BAUHAUS in 1930) said: “Architecture was born, the day when two bricks were laid one on top of the other with care. » He was undoubtedly right about Architecture, but your question introduces two new notions “environment” and “art”. At the risk of paraphrasing him, and I apologize in advance, I will add two words to those of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe: “Architecture was born the day when two bricks were placed on top of each other with care, harmony and emotion. Harmony is the essence of the relationship with the environment. Emotion is the essence of art. »

Harmony, as you know, is both: “correspondence existing between various elements” from the Latin harmonia “agreement” and from the Greek “ἁρμονία” “adjustment, just proportion” What better definition of our relationship with the environment than to be in “agreement”, that our intervention is “adjusted”, or even in “just proportion”.Precision: In agreement or adjusted, does not mean absorbed, drowned, erased, swallowed by the environment. Too many new “environmentalists” (it’s a very recent profession and very fashionable among the Bobos) consider that Architecture must hide in its environment in order to integrate; than these go back to their studies! starting with the reading of “L’ALMANACH D’UN CONTE DES SABLES” that Aldo Léopold wrote in the 1930s, it is one of the founding texts of ecology (the real one).There is no system or systematization, no applicable doctrine every time.
Architecture can just as easily arise, oppose or impose itself in the environment as well as integrate into it. Each intervention is a new case with its specific problem, each Architect will provide its own response.Only the quest for the “agreement” of the “just proportion”, of the “correspondence between various elements” pre-existing or constituted should concern us. If this is not the case, you might as well throw away, pell-mell, with the bathwater, the Ronchamp Chapel by Corbusier, the Sydney Opera House by John Utzon, the Anna do Catalac by Cantinon Calatrava, the Tribaou Center by Renzo Piano, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum etc, etc… in short, all the projects that can be seen! Let Frank Lloyd Wright’s house on the waterfall be concrete, corbelled over the fall of water, it proves that a tiltramodern house (in 1936!) can magnify a natural landscape splendid instead of weakening it. It is an example of this “correspondence between various elements”, and therefore of “environmental integration-absorption”. Architecture can be a sculpture out of step with its environment if it concludes an “agreement” with it, a “just proportion”.But since we are talking about sculpture, your question was ART. I answered: Emotion. Emotion is a “moral disorder” but the etymology that I prefer comes from the Latin “motio” which means “movement” or “disorder, shiver” (of fever). The work of Art is the emotion that disorder, causes this “inner movement” of shivering. The work contains the vibration that its progenitor lived and transmitted, even provoked. This fever, this movement affects us, for good, for bad, in laughter, in tears, in “fever”, it doesn’t matter, it is this “movement” that must be experienced.
To conclude, I’ll give you an example that seems to answer the question you asked me: Architecture, Environment and Art. In 1997, Franck Gehry, created the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, an architectural work that does not particularly blend into its environment.Jonathan GLANCEY, in his book on Architecture, wrote about this work: “The Architecture of the Guggenheim is both an absurd sculpture and a grandiose, spiritual and playful spectacle. Some curators complain about the disadvantages of the Museum’s notoriety because visitors come to admire the building and not the exhibits it contains”.But what happiness! Could one dream of more magnificent complaints! The Architect has brought Art to the other side of the wall!!Good for you,Francois Vieillecroze Architect D.E.S.A.

Vieillecroze architecture firm
38 route des Salins – 83990 Saint-Tropez
PHONE.04 94 55 80 80 – FAX. 04 94 97 76 96
www.vieillecroze.com

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