In this essai, architect Jean-Patrice Calori offers us a remarkable display of curiosity and the ability to draw connections. He approaches the history of his discipline, not as an endless sea, but rather as material that can be manipulated, appropriated, reshaped and interpreted: he transforms history into the raw material of a project, into a living substance.
Should this come as a surprise? Certainly not, for it has always been so. However, it remains essential to reiterate this tirelessly, and we must appreciate this renewed endeavour as it unfolds through a dense and precise body of work.
It is not pure by nature; how could it be? It contains the flaws of interpretation and projection. In these crevices, in the rough edges of reflection, the unexpected may emerge and thus delight us.
Jean-Patrice Calori reminds us that, in this perpetual motion, architecture moves forward and presents itself to the world as an object of scholarly culture capable of transforming it.
Architecture is a quest that leads back to itself.
To its exhaustion, to its hybridisation and, by the same token, to its renewal.
