My name is nobody

My name is nobody

It's a strange world where being nobody becomes a guarantee of fame, where banality and vulgarity gain ground every day to become a factor of success. He who wakes up in the morning satisfied with himself makes his law, he who doubts gets thrown out. Architecture is no exception to this normality. The project that pleases is the project that will be perceived as normal. The project owner who cannot use that epithet will say, "It is a nice project. »

You have to watch out for whoever calls your project cool. Architecture is a creation and creation has nothing to do with the norm. Architecture cannot be normal. However, the project that will emerge will be the one that will have benefited from the best network. The big agencies are wearing dircom' - as communication or commercial - alongside the majors of the construction industry. They get along before, during and after and have lots of "close" friends among the mayors who change the PLUs as fast as we change our pants.

It's coconut business, we're not here to make sense, we're here to get rock.
Have you read Jim Harrison's latest book? Who's he? Marc Levy's hero?

As for the small agencies, they are slowly dying or working themselves to rebuild the barracks for private clients. The medium-sized agencies still resist a little, insist, persevere, hold on as best they can to offer, offer at all costs. There is no need to describe further the situation that everyone knows.
For them, but not for others, yes, Architecture is a fight! A fight against reality, not that of suites in luxury hotels, social events or paid conferences where you can rub around at will; reality is what hits!

Then we find ourselves in a peculiar situation.
The choice has to be made between an academic architecture, that is to say, an object that corresponds in all respects to the programme that is required of it. An object that is finished and finished, as elegant as possible, if it's not, it's not so bad. Above all, it has to provide answers, definitive answers and flatter its sponsor.
All the starchitects who are young and young at heart are part of this deadly reading of architecture.
Deadly because the object is stillborn, padlocked within its limits, its one and only way to last will be in the "maintenance" budget that will be allocated to it. A kind of permanent "cosmetic surgery" budget, no time to take the time, no time to lose, let alone to give.
No one has a job anymore, yet since the advent of the mobile phone, no one has time to answer. Grotesque.
These buildings end up being ridiculous, trying to cling to a time that is no longer theirs. They're blistered with Botox and fatuity. Respectful of order. They're monuments.
The commission seeks to monumentalize everything in order to freeze the object in a tense image that betrays its fear of time passing, its fear of the future, its fear of everything and its screaming lack of imagination.
This monumentalization of architecture escapes the process. And yet it is only the process that makes the city and life, not the "author" label that one sticks on any façade to catalogue it and store it in the great Billy Library of Urban Projects.

Yet another trend may be emerging, perhaps. It must emerge if it finds an echo. It's more open, less sure of itself. It is a process that consists in not only making an object but also in a way of projecting the world, of questioning it, of apprehending it in order to find one's place in it.
To stop being reasonable, and timid, to stop pushing open doors with testosterone. Make your neurons work for the other as much as for yourself, listen to your intuition and respect the sensitive.
Reason should only follow intuition. Reason separates and isolates while intuition unifies and harmonizes.
This world no longer knows how to see sensitive things, filtering everything through its scientific and technical prism. The place of the sensible has been almost totally destroyed by the rigid and cold pre-established programs where everything is foreseen, where the risk taking lies in the choice of the guardrail; where the project must be chosen according to all the safety aspects it conveys. The place of mystery, adventure, discovery is eradicated or almost eradicated. Everything must be explainable, rationalized; no more room is made for any form of non-religious spirituality, obviously.
We must let ourselves be led to believe, to believe that things are possible.
However, can anyone who is in front of something or someone and who feels deeply an emotion saying to himself: "it's beautiful" for example, know how to explain why?
Would he or she know how to explain why the hair on his or her arm rises to the sound of that music? To always want to explain architecture is to want to take away all its capacity for emotion.
Famous buildings are most often buildings that look at each other, they are beautiful from the outside because they are closed, watertight, they enclose the light and the individual is only the spectator. Why are they so closed?
What if all the money went elsewhere than in the façade?
What if we opened these buildings, just to give them a little air, just to let them become what they are and not what we want them to be.
There is a way to do this, a very simple way, to stop taking the individual, the user, as a simple spectator but as an actor, a full-fledged player in the project that is being done with him.

The day we deliver the building it's not finished, it's just beginning its life. Not with the architect, but with the architecture. No longer with the author, but with the actors.
You have to hunt down beauty, you have to hunt down beauty as a kind of revenge on reason.
The architect has to claim to be a disturbing, seductive, enchanting person in the street. To find everywhere the means to push back the limits, to make them understood, if not accepted. This is the only way to arouse the imagination and the will to see differently, to see something else. It is the only way to revalue the individual within the object. It is the only way to propose paths on which freedom can be launched.
It is necessary to arrive at simplicity; in spite of oneself by approaching the real meaning of things.
One must give oneself time again, answer the telephone, be attentive to others, know how to look; one must relearn to hope or rather to hope no more, hope does not exist. You have to believe in what is and to dream in order for this world to start loving itself a little again.

Experimentation will be done by example, the wise child will still have the blessed ass grade of first in the class, he will win contests or free offers without a project where he will have drawn up to the hilt, while the troublemaker will lose them again and again until he gets one, and he gets another and little by little the lines move and the rules change. The survival of the architecture is at stake. Either we continue to make tombs where the "author" architect will soon be employed by Eiffage or Bouygues. Or we can make intelligence and imagination the king and queen of this new chessboard.
For the moment they can't hear us. It's because we're shouting too loud. Let's whisper in their ears when the future is not something to be endured, it is something to be overcome, and it is happening there, in the present.

Matthieu Poitevin

Terence Hill in the film "My name is nobody" by Tonino Valerii, 1973 © DR / Image chosen by the author.