Dear Frédéric Borel,
Ships coming out of the cobblestones or the bitumen, proposing with regard to lines of unexpected horizons; buildings variegated, superimposing colors and forms which, in block, strike the gaze and imagination at the turn of a street; works in weightlessness that give the impression of advancing on the complex time of today’s cities. Between dreaming, science fiction and surrealism, far from monotony and a purely functional minimalism, your architecture, I quote, can be silent or calm, but not banal. Our cities are full of expressions, they need that.” By fragmentation, by superposition, you introduce into the city what you call “the right to surprise”.
Exploring architectural collages, your buildings work the unexpected to the body. By releasing the forms, your expressionism plays on mixing and formal and chromatic multiplications. Your works move, dance, sometimes pretend to fall; they embody the movement of creation being made.
It is this singular approach to architecture that brought you, last year, to the prestigious circle of National Grand Prix of Architecture in 2010, in the line of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, but also of Jean Nouvel, Christian de Portzamparc and Dominique Perrault, to name a few. The role of the architect is, you say, “to amaze the city, to put a part of the dream, to inject imagination into the landscape”; this part of the dream, you also put it in the service of social housing – I am thinking of your achievements in Belleville -, for which you do everything to avoid anonymity and meaninglessness.
Graduate of the Special School of Architecture in 1982, you get the fruits of a decisive encounter with the architect Christian de Portzamparc, with whom you approach the complexities of space and respect for history. Together you meditate on the lessons of the Royal Crescent of Bath, designed in the eighteenth century by John Wood, and he conveys this taste for the spiritual resonance of the volumes.
The following year you win the “New Architecture Program” competition, then you open your own agency. Your early achievements have left their mark. In 1989, Rue de Belleville was offered a new architectural landmark, between R2D2 and the Trojan Horse, which proposed a new way of considering the collective. From these early years, we remember the desire to rediscover the space of the closed courtyard as an extension of neighbourhood life.
The buildings on rue Oberkampf and rue Pelleport introduce revolutionary radicality; on sites without breathing, you erect composite and grandiloquent puzzles seeking vertical space. What initially seemed to be part of a chaotic discontinuity forms a heterogeneous and harmonious whole. An unprecedented gesture for the use of cities. This contradictory experience that you propose to the walker and the inhabitants of a neighborhood will remain your signature.
In your opinion, architecture has the same vision as painting. With this additional difficulty of depth, of space and of beings». This attention to beings, to the quality of the materials, are a constant in your work where a new perception of the ordinary living environment and the desire to brighten up the grey. This attention to the collective landscape is also reflected in your design of public facilities. The University of Agen, built in 1998, the Brive-la-Gaillarde Tax Centre, the Rue de la Moskova school, the yellow orange crèche of the Recollets in Paris play on a centrifugal register, between telluric and galactic. The Narbonne Palace, or the new apartment building in Béthune, as much «homage to the North as to the machines that inhabit the landscape»: all your creations reflect this balance between imagination and matter.
It is a building that is particularly close to my heart as Minister of Culture: the Paris-Val de Seine School of Architecture, completed in 2007. Perched high along the banks of the Seine on former industrial sites, it shows your sense of dialogue with the existing and its history. It also illustrates the deep bonds between aesthetics and use, of which you have the secret. Everything in this building calls for calm, rigour, imagination and wandering, and like the very program of this establishment, it is intended to be didactic, evolutive and original.
In the urban narrative of the 21st century, you draw an open city, inhabited by the taste of contrast, where space becomes a party again.
Dear Frédéric Borel, on behalf of the French Republic, we make you Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Dear Brendan MacFarlane,
Dear Dominique Jakob,
Your architecture lies between immersion and emergence. Each of your projects and achievements have the purpose of externalizing organic interiors, the energy of fluids and flows, networks, natural elements. In your works we find skins that have mutated, marine currents, organisms in mutation, tubulures in mutation, floating soils, conducive to the imagination.
Dear Brendan MacFarlane, you are leaving New Zealand to study in the United States, at the South California Institute of Architecture and then at Harvard. You settled in Paris in the early 1990s. Very quickly you become co-founder of the great adventure of the «Peripheral» collective in which you experiment new architectural solutions.
Dear Dominique Jakob, in 1991, you graduated from the Paris-Villemin School of Architecture. From the crossing of your two paths will arise a common concern for the environmental and memorial question in any architectural project, creating a singular mesh between the building and its environment, whether urban, industrial or natural - like the apple-green membrane of the Cité de la Mode and Design on the banks of the Seine.
In 2000, it was your installation of the Centre Georges Pompidou restaurant that propelled you to the forefront. By leaving its original strength and freedom to the complex interplay of circulations specific to the building of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, you bring it a new flexibility, by deploying an inflating, deformed, undulating aluminum envelope. From this striking realization where all surfaces have the same value and are conceived as a single floor-wall-ceiling wall, you draw a principle from which you never give up: architecture is treated as the conceptual mirror of an environment.
At the same time, you are undertaking the rehabilitation of the Théâtre l'Éclat de Pont-Audemer. In 2001, you were in charge of setting up the Florence Loewy Bookshop, where books are placed on tree-shaped shelves, where the bookshop becomes a living matrix. Three years later, at the Théâtre Maxime Gorki in Petit-Quevilly, you create a wooden skin with a bright red stomach, a poetic and strangely welcoming frame that gives each spectator the impression of being a new Jonah in the bowels of the beast.
You put your intelligence of the conversion of buildings at the service of many achievements, including the T House and the Monument to Memory and Peace of Val de Reuil: that of the «57 Metal» Boulogne-Billancourt and the upcoming completion of the FRAC Centre in Orléans. On the site of the Renault factories, the challenge was twofold: we had to seize the industrial memory of the site and follow in the footsteps of Claude Vasconi, to whom we owe this building which became a symbol of industrial architecture at the end of the 20th century. By reusing the original architectural elements, you have remarkably preserved the identity of the place by freely extending the guidelines of the roof into a series of broken and light walls, and by playing on the boundaries between floor and ceiling.
In Orléans, it is the Regional Fund of Contemporary Art that is about to see the light of day on the former site of military subsidies of Orléans. Here was played a confrontation with a heritage dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Your triptych of glass and metal "Turbulences" draws its originality from the visual impact produced by these tectonic deformations. Its electroluminescent epidermis renews the reading of the building as well as the use of heritage signage. You will thus allow this new place of cultural excellence, I am convinced, to embody its vocation to become a laboratory of artistic creativity and architectural innovation.
These are the interferences that you constantly seek, in all your experiments, whether architectural or scenographic. I am thinking for example of the Maison H project in Corsica, or of the Orange Cube in Lyon, a surprising quadrilateral disemboweled that is part of a networked world, open to all connections.
By marrying materiality and capturing movement, by embracing technological innovations, traces of the past and creative impetus in the same way, your work proposes new symbioses that make a major contribution to contemporary architecture.
Dear Brendan MacFarlane, on behalf of the French Republic, we present you with the insignia of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Dear Dominique Jakob, on behalf of the French Republic, we make you an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Dear Louise Cox,
Throughout his career, the distinguished architect you are has paid exemplary attention to natural and urban contexts, to respect the environment and to supporting its transformations.
At the University of Sydney, you specialize in organizing the city and the landscape. You join Mc Connel Smith & Johnson, where you will be director until 1997, where you oversee the development of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, among many other projects related to the city of Sydney. Among your many contributions to Australian and international architecture committees, your very strong involvement in the International Union of Architects has given you an outstanding legitimacy in the profession: you become its president in 2008.
One of your priorities is to make architects aware of their duty to be responsible for climate change and respect for the environment. If you remain the first to support the freedom of initiative and encourage the imagination of each of your colleagues, you do not hesitate to question the viability of “anything is possible” in the choices of locations. Reintroducing, in the era of “starchitectes” and their prestigious achievements, a look at a “sustainable future”; addressing the challenges of reducing greenhouse gas emissions or the consumption of non-renewable energy: so many concerns that lead you to go back over the history of our older constructions, by valuing the empirical principles of their design, when the thickness of the stones adapted to the climate and the shape of the roofs to the recurrence of the rains, to develop solutions. Alexander Pope had written this maxim: «The ungrateful are to their benefactors what a reckless man does to a tree from which he cuts all the branches that put his house away from the storm». You invite the profession to seek in the past architecture these principles of compatibility of a building with its environment, in order to reinterpret the creative gesture in a responsible perspective. An approach that benefits from your extensive knowledge of heritage and its conservation, which you demonstrated during your missions to the International Union of Architects with its «Heritage Works Program», and for the «National Heritage Committee» Royal Australian Institute of Architects – you were the first woman to lead this prestigious institution in 1994. You have also transmitted these values during your many training missions, notably within the Training Commission of the International Union of Architects (UIA) and the UNESCO-UIA Council for the Validation of Architectural Studies. You have actively contributed to the updating of the Charter of Architect Training.
This heritage concern is not incompatible with your shared enthusiasm for the new technological possibilities offered to architects in terms of coordination between the various building trades and building management systems.
When you arrived in 2008 at the head of the International Union of Architects, you insisted on affirming your desire to transform this institution into “an open, respectful, tolerant and visionary organization working to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged and the homeless.” This commitment is reflected in the implementation of rapid assistance programs for reconstruction in the event of a natural disaster, such as the one that recently rocked Haiti.
With the energy of your involvement and your unifying enthusiasm, you make a major contribution to the new orientations of tomorrow’s architecture, where the aesthetic gesture intersects more than ever the principle of responsibility.
For the quality of your commitment and action, Dear Louise Cox, on behalf of the French Republic, we present you with the insignia of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.