Receiving an archive entails the responsibility of preserving it, studying it and, above all, making it visible. […] The second act was the monographic exhibition of the Patrick Bouchain archive on the occasion of the first Orléans Architecture Biennale, of which he was the guest of honour.

The models already formed, in the exhibition, an archipelago in which we could wander from the memory of one building to another — sometimes from the memory of an idea, or of a sketch. Their arrangement in the exhibition space demonstrated their aesthetic autonomy.

With the one hundred and eighty notebooks, it was the impossibility of showing everything that posed a problem. In the exhibition space, we opted for a series of landscapes of closed notebooks. Hung on the walls, they formed horizon lines presenting the notebook as a museum object, and no longer as the thing that had accompanied the architect throughout his career. […] The closed notebooks became an open image. Those that no longer fitted on the walls, for lack of space, were exhibited stacked on the floor.

This is how the book appeared to us as the space where the notebooks could at last be opened.

Publication: Patrick Bouchain, L'architecture comme relation, Actes Sud / Frac Centre-Val de Loire →