Visions

«The architect deals with a tiny part of the cosmos. The place, the ideas, the choices - there’s a genesis in every building, with all its secrets. The design dreams the construction, the building reveals it in the landscape, the reality in broad daylight nuances everyday life, and culture feeds on it day after day.

My Japanese experience is a desire to explore another culture where the landscape is at the centre. Space is fragile and transitory, making the city instantaneous, where things fall into place like the result of an unknown process.

Here, each generation remakes its city according to more urgent concerns than whether the city is ‘beautiful’. The city seems to be the fruit of chance, according to the higher constraints. Constraints mean that we no longer have to ignore the whole, but have to work with it. The houses are then rather «elastic» to bend to the Whole.The wall is fragile, according to another idea of the rational. Between interior and exterior, between solidity and fragility, space is more ambiguous and less defined. The houses seem more buried in the cosmos of their tenuous limits? These mixtures give rise to more infinity, even in the smallest of spaces... to the eternity of a tiny landscape.

There is the hidden aspect of beings, the secrets of souls whose mysteries architecture explores. The architect also builds for the impalpable, to make everyday life precious. The hidden dimension of architecture gives silence its vocation. Shapes soften or lift, they orientate, enlarge the distance, the luminosity. They provide the rhythm of an escape to reach a place where weightlessness is different. Perspectives point out what we never thought possible, curves, straight lines, a view transports us into another fluid and light «universe». Things fall into place in line with the places where they are to be achieved.»

Henri GUEYDAN, Architecte