Guy Rottier, Rovering Architecture

The engineer and architect Guy Rottier (1922-2013) is the author of a multiple and unclassifiable body of work, in which art and architecture, poetry and technology, are in dialogue. With an unusual, dazzling and uncompromising style, he aimed to radically renew the architectural language and the way people lived. Mischievous, whimsical and free, Guy Rottier defended a lifelong approach to architecture that was more playful than entertaining, more childlike than childish, defying all laws - those of tradition as well as those of gravity - to instil dynamism and movement into the overly sclerotic order of this world.

Flying holiday homes or cardboard houses, veritable manifestos against regional-style seasonal dwellings grouped together in the same place; underground houses, providing inexpensive solutions to the housing problem of the 1960s; evolving "snail" houses, whose spiral structure allows rooms to be added as the family grows... all his projects, designed to meet people's needs as closely as possible and with a concern to preserve the environment, combine ingenuity and wit.