(Sumatra & France, 1922 - 2013)
The Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans is paying tribute to one of the most original artistic and architectural figures from the second half of the XXth century: Guy Rottier. Bringing together more than one hundred and fifty drawings, photographs and models preserved by the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, this exhibition is the most important retrospective ever devoted to the architect. It is a testament to the important relationship between Guy Rottier and this institution, which for more than twenty years has been working towards the dissemination and international recognition of this unusual personality. This exhibition also has the value of a manifest. By following in the wake of an open art work, mutating and poaching to begin his new trek, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire traces a line running through the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléan: that of wandering. Featuring a truly unique style, fuliginous and uncompromising, Guy Rottier intended to radically change the architectural language as well as our modes of living in it. Never actually producing a system. Fun loving, fanciful, free, Guy Rottier spent his life defending an architectural approach more playful than entertaining, more child like than childish, defying any laws – those of tradition as much as those of gravity – installing dynamism and movement in the all too sclerotic order of the world: “Some men build, others invade, settle down, demolish and rebuild. They are the same men, architects by nature that, until the apocalypse, build, clear and recreate an agglomeration, a neighborhood, a house. Because everything changes … because everything has to change: the relief of the world, the nature of things, the house of man”. (Guy Rottier)
