Patrick Berger Architecte   Paris

Architecture is made of elements, scenes, landscapes. Its art consists in assembling them to construct another idea of nature. What is nature ? It is the latest state of things. There is no such thing as the cultural on one side and the natural on the other. Everything is nature : as much the physical singularities of a geography as the signs constructed by its history, or the desires and practices shared within it.

Nature has its laws, and the urban follows them. It has no interest in exceptions ; it knows only solutions and scales — solutions of material elements, of overall relationships, of duration… It combines them according to each situation and puts them into practice through a form that always tends toward geometry.

This exhibition presents an architecture that explores these principles : current projects of urban architecture drawn from constructive elements responding to today’s environmental necessities ; works of a more institutional or monumental scale seeking a fusion with vast landscapes ; a selection of earlier projects that initiated this experimentation ; elements, scenes, landscapes…

(Original text of 2002, machine translated in 2026.)