Réenchanter le monde — Architecture, ville, transitions — Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 21 → October 6, 2014

Re-enchanting the world is an exhibition-manifesto on the future of the inhabited world, designed with the prizewinning architects of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture. As the years have gone by, these architects have created a research, experimentation, questioning stage, recognized in the worldwide debate on large-scale transitions — ecological, demographic or urban.

These transitions are occurring right now, before our very eyes. From the first shock in 1974 to the systemic crisis of 2008, these are not simple jolts that have curbed the course of things but a genuine rupture that has taken place. It separates a century that founded progress on the exploitation of resources, thought to be inexhaustible, from a 21st century that must first ponder what progress we need, then look for alternatives.

As is traditionally accepted, architecture, a commissioned work, cannot truly weigh on challenges that are as global and uncertain as the depletion of resources or the violence done to human beings by the iniquity of development.

The protagonists of Re-enchanting the world assert that an architect is only contemporary if he faces these realities, questions the programs, the production and decision- making methods that we have inherited from the modern industrial order.

The art of inhabiting the earth

When we visit the Mauritanian hospital in Kaedi, Hangzhou University, the rue Delacroix in Boulogne-sur-Mer, we discover places that architecture has civilized, whereas in these spots the worst was a certainty. In Hangzhou, that was being razed, in the midst of the Fourth World in Boulogne, or the underdevelopment in Kaedi.

This stage that comes close to utopia resists, invents other practices. The dialogue on it between the architects of the North and the South provides another vision of the world : on the building of cultures, the reversal of exchanges, the centers of and the reasons for innovation, on the way that architecture helps human beings to transformer the course of things.

Now that the debate on the planet’s future has swelled, the stage of the Global Awards has the legitimacy to write its manifesto. Re-enchanting the world presents an architecture in movement, complex, teeming.

It can disconcert, if we compare it to the unity of style of international academic works. It proposes the ethics and aesthetics of an art of inhabiting based on exchange, openness to new knowledge, commitment.

Marie-Hélène Contal, exhibition curator