2020–2021
French Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale
Exhibition design with Christophe Hutin, curator.
The project “Communities at Work” explores the intersection between an architect’s expertise and residents’ experiences of their own living environments. This cross-disciplinary approach to the profession seeks to shed light on architecture’s role in a rapidly changing contemporary world.
The exhibition presents a journey of the mind through architecture by examining five specific cases across different continents: Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. The goal is to offer an optimistic perspective on a world where resident communities directly shape their living environments and daily lives.
These various approaches do not follow a formal theoretical framework designed by an architect but bear witness to the slow and multifaceted transformations of a living space by its own inhabitants. Communities appear to be the most relevant resources for transforming inhabited environments, thereby giving rise to a new way of conceiving a “spatial” contract derived from bottom-up approaches.
Graphic design — Benjamin Ribeau