Maisons-mères - Utopian and concrete architectures

Whale houses, shell houses or mystery castles, architectures without architects play with balance and form, hijack materials, erect themselves at night, play wolf-are-you in a marvelous zone between the authorized and the forbidden. The fadas, zinzins and utopians who inhabit them have other things to do than listen to what we think of them. They've got work to do. A dungeon to finish, a balcony to paint, a mechanism that will allow the house to rise into the air, turn on itself and move on a rail. This is serious business, and we don't have much time to chat. Militants of stone and breeze-block, heroes of the "beautification of everyday life", builders without diplomas are sowing small architectural miracles in the landscape. Their boundless inventiveness makes their neighbors jealous, their freedom irritates elected officials, and their unbridled singularity mirrors the gloomy mush of modern urbanism.

A world tour of these architectural adventures

After -ORGANuGAMME-, which Danielle Jacqui donated to the city of Renens, it's her house we're talking about. An architectural nugget in the hinterland of Marseille, the Roquevaire house is in the process of being listed, even though it doesn't meet any of the criteria. But it's not the only one. This is an opportunity to take a world tour of these constructive adventures, inviting us to think of them for themselves, without being tied to a box, a rule or a lineage. Their only style is handmade. Only human. They liberate and decolonize us. They are the sensitive and unexpected of modern cities. Far from being rare practices, their accumulation is a system, and their insolent relevance forces us to think of them as miraculous players in increasingly uniform landscapes.

An exhibition tailor-made for La Ferme des Tilleuls

Nestled between the train tracks and those of the resurrected tramway, in a no-man's-land conducive to daydreams, La Ferme des Tilleuls is ideally placed to measure the stakes and violence of the famous "urban renewal" project. Threatened with destruction, listed as a historic monument, home to Danielle Jacqui's work, a lively place of exchange and culture in the city center, its fate alone justifies a symposium on the meaning of home.

To fuel the debate (without taking itself too seriously), the exhibition Maisons-mères et ses nouvelles découvertes (Mother Houses and New Discoveries) has been custom-built for La Ferme des Tilleuls. A special place is reserved for Mario Del Curto, who has been tracking these singular architectures for 40 years. The photographer has also been commissioned by La Ferme des Tilleuls to document a number of little-known or unknown Swiss environments to be discovered in the exhibition.

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.