BIOGRAPHY

Hervé Baley (1933-2010) is an architect of conviction, a enthusiast, whose independence and freedom often place him against the grain of the rest of French architectural production. The work of Frank Lloyd Wright is the source of his work, but it would be quite simplistic to think that it is the only one. In fact, his first years spent in the free workshops of the Beaux-Arts were pivotal years where all his future centers of interest were established. First, an architecture thought and felt through space, which he owes to his first teacher, Georges-Henri Pingusson (1894-1978), and then of course, a discovery with wonder of the creations of Frank Lloyd Wright. ........

Hervé Baley then continued his training with a younger architect, Jean Faugeron (1915-1983), whose taste for modern architecture did not prevent him from appreciating students with divergent sensibilities.....

Baley then followed many years of self-taught research on this path which led him to build his own architectural vision.....

During his second trip to the United States, he broadened his interest to a young generation of architects freely nourished by Wrightian precepts (Bruce Goff, Paolo Soleri, Herbe Greene): an architecture in tune with nature and listening to the needs of the man who inhabits it.... Hervé Baley is also interested in the thought developed by Gurdjieff, an esoteric philosopher from the first half of the 20th century of whom Georges-Henri Pingusson was also a reader. ...the interest in the latter rather leads him to go to the very origins of the philosophy of this group: in Turkey......

During the 1960s, Hervé Baley became an architect fully committed to sensitive and determined thinking about architecture. Both an analogy with nature and at the service of man to improve his presence in the world, Baley's architectural thinking is a demand for honesty and sincerity. His conviction in his ideas, little in keeping with the monumental and accelerated construction of France since the post-war period, quickly positioned him as a marginal artist, a figure of the French architectural counterculture. The 1960s nevertheless remained conducive to the development of a new generation of architects, .... Hervé Baley would undoubtedly not have been propelled so quickly to a teaching position at the École Spéciale d' Architecture. He alone embodies the need for renewal that the students of the School have strongly expressed. The Sens et Espace workshop quickly became a passionate and dynamic “architecture group”. In parallel with the preparation of two exhibitions within the ESA, Bruce Goff in 1969, and Frank Lloyd Wright in 1977, Hervé Baley asked his students for an architectural approach that pushed them to develop a new creative imagination. His educational approach is a true practical application of phenomenology: by focusing on his own sensitive perception, made possible thanks to his body, the student learns to better understand space; he learns to understand the mechanisms of his perception and then apply them in his own projects. Hervé Baley is indeed convinced that an open sensitivity can only better nourish the imagination. The result will be sincere and deeply honest, personal works. The teacher's approach is comprehensive and can only be understood through experimentation: body exercises, spatial experimentation sessions, graphic drawings, project renderings, thematic group work, all are intended to create an atmosphere conducive to expressive liberation of each one. .....

At the beginning of the 1980s, Hervé Baley was confronted with a new management of the ESA which radically changed the political line of the establishment. Baley, already a teacher for more than ten years, tends to withdraw. He is also entering a perhaps more introspective period, which pushes him to want to record in writing the reflections he has been carrying out since he became an architect.

The Glossary, one of his main occupations, became his major educational tool. His teaching was then slightly modified: the development of his conferences in fact led him towards a more theoretical approach. .......

Hervé Baley, from 1968, devoted himself body and soul to his teaching activity, to the point of sacrificing his agency.....

The Sens et Espace workshop, which occupied him for twenty-two years, perhaps remained for Hervé Baley the most important work of his life.