Dear Jean-Paul Viguier,
"By building," he smiled, "I think I have
built myself,” writes Paul Valéry, whom you quote in your book.
soberly titled Architect.
Because in models, whether physical or dematerialised by
there are also all the journeys of a creator’s life, the
images from elsewhere, the presence of history, humanist concern, jumps
towards the future, trees and gardens that will grow, projected lives,
and all the talent needed to make it all stand up.
With some two million square meters to his credit, Jean-Paul
Viguier is unquestionably a «star-architect», as we often say
both in France and abroad. However, your work does not
performance. On the contrary, one of your
first international successes returns to elegance and simplicity
of the French Pavilion of the Universal Exhibition of Seville, in
1992, evocation of a primitive shelter based on a technical mastery and
very noticed. The Viguier style was then imposed on the
international architecture scene.
Sobriety, boldness, reflection, history are the words that immediately come to
with regard to your architectural work. Your success, you
in part to your struggle against what you call the
French architectural “conservatisms”. Throughout your career,
whether for the André Citroën park for which you receive with your
partners the Grand Prix du Moniteur des Villes, the headquarters of Morocco
Telecom in Rabat or the Sofitel Water Tower hotel in Chicago, you have
for each type of building the same requirement in terms of audacity and
of inventiveness.
You state in this regard that there is no building more useful than the
other”. “In France,” you add, “it took a long time for the
understand.” Your column within the journal “Urbanisme” to which
you worked together for eight years,
urban architecture theorist. Paris will have been at the heart of your
inspirations for more than twenty years now, and in return, the City
Light has seen its landscape transform by successive touches, to
through so many important milestones of its mutation that carry your
brand.
From your training in Fine Arts in France to urban planning
at Harvard University, you have kept the taste of cities constant
work in progress, whose major American cities are
the illustration. The Defense was therefore for you a privileged playground.
Your “Coeur Défense” project, to which you have devoted nearly ten
years of your life testifies to your ambition for a new generation
of towers.
Strongly committed to environmental values - such as
greenhouses and bamboos of the André Citroën park, the realization of which you
years with Patrick Berger, Jean-François Jodry and the
landscapers Alain Provost and Gilles Clément, or gardens that will be
planned throughout the future Majunga Tower of the Defence, which is
among the major projects currently being carried out by your agency,
Lyon Clonfluence and the Cancéropôle on the factory site
AZF of Toulouse, you fervently support that any building must
“make progress visible” and facilitate with new materials
environmental quality requirements, particularly in terms of
energy cost reduction. A concern in
many of your projects, including the Jane and Arthur Stieren
McNay Museum in San Antonio, dedicated to modern European and
American, where natural zenith light is treated through a laminate
complex of sunshades, blinds and sandblasted glass panels. More
once, purity and intelligence agree for spaces also
light and transparent as a piece of glass, a material for which
you have a very great affinity, as can also be seen in your
France Télévisions headquarters. Some examples among
other major achievements that have earned you the highest
awards, starting with the first jury prize of the competition for
the Opéra Bastille, in 1981, the first prize tied for the project Tête
Defense in 1983, or your mention to the Equerre d'Argent in 1988
for the M19 technical building in Aubervilliers.
Your reflection on modernity is also closely linked to a
unique re-reading of the past, in the service of heritage. You have
gave new life to the ancient form of the atrium: I think of the
the headquarters of the Caisse des Dépôts in Boulogne-
Billancourt, or that of your building in Vörösmarty Square
Budapest. I also think of the Pont du Gard site, which you have
revisited with your agency by harmoniously endowing it with its
museum of archaeology; or the media library that blends with the
square of the cathedral of Reims in a remarkable game of mirrors. Far
of the universalist abstractions of the twentieth century, your modernity cannot
express that through the idea of a contextualization that you defend
which is closely interwoven with the function of buildings,
history and urban cultures. In the manner of the Shoreline of
Syrtes by Julien Gracq, one of your reference authors, where the border
between the past and anticipation is undecidable.
To these outstanding professional performances, I want to add your
Seamless involvement in leading public interest actions,
for which you volunteered responsibilities with
an exemplary commitment, notably between 1999 and 2002 as
President of the prestigious Academy of Architecture.
For the richness of your contribution to French architecture and urban planning,
for your contribution to its international influence, for its elegance and
the beauty of your interdisciplinary approach, on behalf of the President of the
Republic and by virtue of the powers conferred upon us, we you
Let’s make Officer of the Legion of Honor.
Dear Dominique Alduy,
For nearly twenty years you have been one of the central personalities of the
world of French media. I am very pleased to receive today
the one who has served with the highest commitment
in the fields of communication, audiovisual, press and
cultural administration – an example also for the feminization of
key positions and governing bodies for which France still has
way to go.
Graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Graduate Studies
economics and the University of Pennsylvania, you
start your career at the age of 23 in 1967 at the Documentation Centre on
planning department of the Ministry of Equipment. Assigned to the
of the Alpes-Maritimes, the excellence of your services
be appointed responsible for financial studies on the
local authorities and public facilities serving business
economic and international. Promoted in 1976 in charge of
to the Secretary General of the New Cities Central Group, you
will be appointed head of the commission “Habitat et carde de vie du
8th Plan» at the Commissariat au Plan.
It is on the strength of these successes and your expertise that you are called to
Office of Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy to take over a
mission on social policy, before joining the Caisse des Dépôts and
Registrations as Director of Programs of the subsidiary dedicated to
member of its Executive Board from 1985 and finally
President of its cable subsidiary, as well as Médiacité.
Perfectly at ease in the arcana of politics as in the
relations with local elected representatives, it is then to the audiovisual sector that
you dedicate yourself, confronting the challenges related to the evolutions
technology and chain management. You defend before the CSA
the files of Canal Musique and Canal Enfant, Canal J, that you
lead for one year; then you are also an administrator of the
SFP (French Production Company) and Arte France, which is then in
its beginnings. These qualities are worth being chosen in 1989 to occupy
the position of Executive Director of the Société nationale des programmes
France-Regions 3 and become CEO of FR3 Films
Productions, then France 3 Cinema, without forgetting your presidency of the
economic interest group of France 3 and Radio-télévision
Belgian Francophone (RTBF), in which you took over the
production of common programs. Across your functions
you have provided valuable and dynamic assistance, which has contributed to
changing habits, renewing programs, ensuring
programming freedom and increasing the role of regions and
local authorities in French television.
Versatility, always: from December 1993 to March 1994, you exercise the
Director General of the Centre Georges-Pompidou. You have
then put your skills at the service of the press, especially the
SARL Le Monde, of which you will be a member for ten years
Executive: editor of the daily newspaper, the Lettre du monde de l'éducation and
Le Monde de l'Education. In the field of
In this case too, you have developed the qualities of administrators
that have earned you increasing responsibilities. As
Les Cahiers du Cinéma, the Paris Press Union and
Agence France Presse have passed into the hands of the administrator
conscientious and determined that you are. A world of press that
you have not left your eyes, since you have been the Vice-President since 2008
of Cartooning For Peace, an initiative born at the
United Nations and designed by designer Plantu to promote
including conferences to “unlearn intolerance.”
According to the famous formula of General de Gaulle in Le fil de l'épée, «
authority is not without prestige”, and I would add without competence and without
ability to judge: you exercise these qualities wisely in all
your responsibilities, including your mandate
of the Paris Commercial Court, to which you are elected in
october 2005.
In the same year, you return to the world of cultural institutions,
by taking the lead of the «Paris Quartier d'été» Festival, which consolidates the square
Paris in its eminent status as the international capital of the arts.
Since 2006, finally, you are the head of the board of directors of the
Theatre of the City, where you accompany with enthusiasm and
the new policy of this remarkable institution run by
the very talented Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who succeeded under your
presidency to Gérard Violette.
As a great professional, you have served the fields of publishing, publishing and
written press, audiovisual communication and institutions
with a sense of public interest and an open mind
remarkable. Through your work, you have contributed greatly to
the evolution and adaptation of the companies and establishments you
have administered, so that they remain fully engaged with their audiences
and our society.
Dear Dominique Alduy, on behalf of the President of the Republic, we
let’s make Commander in the National Order of Merit.