GOOD STORIES MAKE GOOD FRIENDS.

Find a last minute gift, a book by swiss grench architectes or about Charlotte Perriand, or maybe a bible...

Also to be read in Bilan  on the Opinions / Immobilier page.

From Lausanne to the Tower of Babel

Maybe the most beautiful book of the year. A sum that retraces the 25 years of activity of the Bakker & Blanc architects office through 34 projects, realised or not. The quality of the iconography, the choice of paper and an editorial construction inspired by the Tower of Babel by Bruegel the Elder make this book a reference coffe table book. From BABL to Babel, a form of Bible with a thousand facets.

Darwin's Theater, BABL at Work, Park Books, 612 p.
DesignMathias Clottu
www.bakkerblanc.ch
www.park-books.com

Building together (or not) the large ensembles

The question of housing, its density, its mix and its new codes of conviviality/functionality is at the heart of urban planning thinking. With Les abandonnés, Xavier de Jarcy, a journalist at Télérama, looks back at the prolematics of the French suburbs through the construction of large housing estates in the 1970s. Where the drift would not be linked to immigration, but rather to a brutal liberalism. Consistent and enlightening.

Les Abandonnés, Histoire des "cités de banlieue", Xavier de Jarcy, ed. Albin Michel, 459 p.
www.albin-michel.fr

Charlotte Perriand forever

At the end of the year, it's all about her. The subject of a monster retrospective at the Vuitton Foundation, Charlotte Perriand is also the subject of a multitude of books. Comic strip by Berberian, bio by Laure Adler or a reasoned sum of her projects, make your choice, because all these books come to consecrate the creativity of a major architect and for too long a recluse in the suffocating shadow of the Corbu.
Skiers here should take the opportunity to visit Avoriaz or Les Arcs, because it's always the same architectural slap in the face!

Charlotte Perriand by Laure Adler, ed. Gallimard, and by Charles Berberian. ed. Chêne
www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

My tree house, at the bottom of the garden, in Canada...

These little books are like so many indispensable breviaries. Following in the footsteps of Thoreau's works, Marielle Macé explores the imaginary world of tree houses. But rather than isolating herself in the manner of the American naturalist, she claims cabins to inhabit the world differently. To enlarge it. A way of thinking based on considerations related to the construction of the "zone to be defended" of Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

To be coupled with Notre-Dame-des-Landes or the profession of living at éd. Loco
Nos cabanes, Marielle Macé, ed. Verdier, 128 p.
éditions-verdier.fr

At the discretion of François Halard

"I wouldn't have been able to do the kind of photos I do today if I hadn't had this experience of introversion," says a long-stuttering, dyslexic François Halard as a child. The result are images with an inimitable grain, as if they were a personal story, a kind of intimate filter that he would come to affix when he visits Louise Bourgeois' studio, Saul Leiter's apartment or the house of the painter Giorgio Morandi.

François Halard (vol. 2) - L'intime photographié, ed. Actes sud, 452 p.
francoishalard.com
www.actes-sud.fr

Under the cobblestones, the landscape

A major figure in the architectural landscape, Georges Descombes functions through his understanding of the terrain, more than through its transformation. With this box of 22 leporellos, based on completed or unfinished projects, his reflection unfolds, a way of thinking that unfolds. We will not necessarily obtain the expected answers (the result, the methodology), but rather the visual, deductive, curious cartography of a spirit which, referring to Philippe Jacottet, tends to "explain nothing, but pronounce it right".

Déplacements, Georges Descombes,éd. infolio
www.infolio.ch
www.superpositions.ch

Enjoy !