(France, 1945)
The architect Patrick Bouchain is the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans’s guest of honor and has a major exhibition devoted to him. He has mastered the art of capturing, unifying and exposing understanding and know-how that enables us to live differently. Looking back over five decades of creation, this exhibition offers an unprecedented inventory of some one hundred and fifty projects designed by Patrick Bouchain from 1967 to 2017. It is possible thanks to the donation of the architect’s archive by the architect to the Frac Centre-Val de Loire – whose collection is one of the most important in the world concerning architecture’s relationship to experimentation and utopia. This monograph exposes an exceptional corpus of resources, allowing for a renewal of understanding about the work of Patrick Bouchain while re-examining the meaning of an architectural collection. The exhibition, designed as an atlas, reveals a first time look into the contents of numerous sketchbooks he created for each project. These books are a tool for observing the world, where the convolutions of drawing, collage and writing become intertwined with a seductive oral thought process that is unabashedly stimulated by a dialogue with society.
