Manuelle Gautrand Architecte   Paris

Each of these projects tells, in its own way, what a cultural program can be today and what it brings about within a city.

As Saint-John Perse put it, culture is « the luxury of unaccustomedness. »

(…) These projects stem from a certain disobedience, a certain refusal of convention, imagining places that can retain a share of experimentation (…).

Artistic practices today take on polymorphous forms ; they are constantly evolving, endlessly reinventing themselves : architecture must follow these movements (…).

The projects presented are very different from one another : sometimes they have sought to slip into the site, transforming and declining themselves within a certain continuity of style ; sometimes they have felt the need for a certain disobedience and have slipped in with a deliberate formal freedom. Sometimes they have sought to produce simple, clear functional spaces ; sometimes, on the contrary, they have sought to imagine more flexible and ambiguous places.

(Original text of 2003, machine translated in 2026.)