ENG |
Doing something crazy shouldn't be an exercise in frivolity that only calls for noisy, messy gestures. For us, it's a necessary meditation on the city, and the possibility that it holds within it moments of suspension and pause. It's an invitation to nature and the living within and within the thickness of buildings. It's a discourse whose words are those of architecture, with its codes and hijacked meanings. Finally, it's a celebration of the useless, the contingent and the unexpected, in that it broadens the field of the real and the possible.
Nature, the living, invites itself and interferes in Folie, historically in a picturesque and romantic tradition that conjures up the imaginary of ruins as a meditation on the passing of time. Today, to invite nature is to take account of the violent collapse of living things. It means creating a sanctuary. All our buildings must now make way, no longer mere shells, but porous membranes that breathe.
Nature is on the ground on the forecourt, in the dilation of the park and the erasure of this boundary. It invites itself into the exaggerated thickness of the façade, which houses planters, and into all the loggias. It becomes productive on the roof with a farm and deeply symbolic with an immense tree planted at the heart of the communal space and suspended in the void.