Today: Art and Architecture, September 1966, n°54 France 1, p.64

 

Architecture is the means of situating the individual in a vital context.

It is the gesture of creating a place which gives him the possibility of being at home in the surrounding framework, which situates him in relation to this framework and situates him in relation to himself. In this alone lies real comfort.

It is the gesture of welcoming.

It is making the form welcome the space and the space the light; that the interior welcomes the exterior and that the exterior exalts the interior.

It’s about making space flourish using light and shapes.

The work built like a plant develops. There is only the development of forms and spaces developing: an approach that man decides by his gesture and accompanies in his gesture.

The gesture is the efflorescence of geometry in which it flourishes and exalts itself, becoming alive and spatial; as is its adornment, it is its reason for being, its richness, its language.

The architectural work is in continual change according to the various breaths of life; she is herself life and becoming; it can therefore neither be included in a definition nor be established as a theory.

It is atmosphere and not image. Image: defined proposition which is prisoner of itself and which imprisons, expression of a moment in an era, in a style, in a fashion.

Since the Renaissance, with their semblance of revolutions, these have been our architectural pride.

An image will only ever be beautiful or ugly. An atmosphere will always be evocative.

Architecture is incantation and evocation; its essence is analogy, its research is knowledge of life, its expression is poetry, its verb is timeless.

 

Hervé Baley.

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