Device
“This is the prehistoric map of the Gironde”, exclaim the children.
There are 26 of them around the board-territory device that we are presenting in the Nouvelles saisons, self-portraits of a territory exhibition at arc en rêve in Bordeaux. We've just looked up to focus on this object projected on the wall. The children come from the Entre-deux-Mers area of Gironde, from Saint-Laurent-du-Bois and Sauveterre-de-Guyenne. In 2023, we ran two architecture and landscape workshops with them, working on a collective housing project.
An hour before this remark, we were gathered around a wooden tray, strangely cut and slightly raised from the ground so that we could crouch down and gather in a circle. A straight line cut into the tray allowed us to orientate the device in space by looking for north. Two black crosses indicated the exact position of two places. The children recognized some of the images and objects on the board: a postcard, a model of the project and the façades of their village’s houses. The board gradually became a familiar geography, a 1:50,000 scale map. Now, behind this jagged outline, you could make out the straight line of the Atlantic coast, the wide sandy beach, the funnel shape of the Arcachon basin and even the beginning of the mouth of the Gironde.
The board-territory has an earthy appearance. Residents of the Gironde will recognize the Garonne’s color, which results from the gradual meeting of fresh water with salt water from the ocean and the reaction of fine particles of clay in suspension with the salt. This is the color of the silts. The Garonne rises on the slopes of the Aneto (3,404 meters), the highest peak in the Pyrenees, 500 km from Bordeaux. Silt is the final stage in the erosion of the Pyrenean rocks as they approach the ocean, a geological process on the scale of the Earth's history.
The narrative spirals out of control, the scales telescope. Imagination becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes imagination.
Sources and resources
The architect Carles Oliver (IBAVI1) refers to architecture as a “map of resources”. In his view, producing ecological architecture today –an architecture that is ethical in relation to the environmental challenges facing our industrial societies, can only be achieved through a heightened awareness of resources. This means asking questions about the origin of materials, taking an interest in the manufacturing and transformation processes used to produce construction products, and locating where and how the components of the built object are manufactured. This requirement is becoming a duty of knowledge and awareness, to better anchor the question of the act of building in its ecological meaning.
Knowledge and imagination are intimately linked. We need to understand the terms sources and resources both in terms of concrete materials (exploited, transformed, quantified, assembled) and in terms of the imaginations that are expressed or inspired: imaginative resources, sources of inspiration and knowledge.
It is this double meaning that interests us: material sources and resources, sources and resources of knowledge and imagination.
Compass
This Inuit map has accompanied our work at Atelier Provisoire for over 20 years. We first encountered it in Hummocks2, by geographer, ethnologist and explorer of the Far North Jean Malaurie. This dreamlike object helped us to imagine and solve a school and playground project. This real map and the imagination it conjures up escape us as much as they captivate us. What is the scale of this “territory”?
The drawings we see clearly trace the deep links between a human society and its environment and its inhabitants in the broadest sense: marine and land animals, coastlines, reliefs, ships, hunting scenes, migrations, bones, architecture, rituals... A map of knowledge and landmarks. An entire millennia-old society pictured in this way, without any scale of time or space. But it could also be said, on the other hand, that this is a map perfectly to scale, since the medium on which it is depicted is a sealskin. The size of the animal is real, and the result is a 1:1 scale map.
The seal is at the center of collective life in circumpolar civilizations. It alone symbolizes these societies, which developed in close symbiosis with their environment. This map is an exact representation of this “seal civilization”. It's a hybrid representation that combines the scale of the real and the off-scale of the imaginary.
This map is also, for us, a permanent architectural lesson, a reference point that helps us to clarify the challenges of the architectural object, but also to guide and nourish the design process itself. What do we base the act of designing on? What are the links to the places we are looking for? What are the elements of resolution and their meanings? What imaginary worlds and sources of inspiration?
Borrowing and restitution, agreements and connections, narratives, compositions, dealing with places as occupied places, fabula in situ are all terms that mark out our working method. The architecture we pursue is intended to be as close to and as attentive as possible to the observation of reality, despite the use of digitized virtualization tools. We seek and learn more from the complexity of the living and the everyday in terms of compositions and encounters than from the simplifying efficiency of the rational division of knowledge and technical-rational objectives. We prefer the harmonization of opposites to the addition of ratios blinded by their precision. So, how do we go about it?
This map, which speaks of a particular territory and culture, is also a kind of compass for us. A guardian figure that helps us to direct our project method beyond the constraints of programming and standardized objectives. It's both a direction and an ethic that requires us not to lose sight of what's going on in the place. And always trying to produce architectural forms that are capable of weaving deep links with local futures and imaginations.
1 Instituto Balear de la Vivienda, Balearic Islands Housing Institute.
2 Hummocks. Journeys and Inquiries Among the Canadian Inuit, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. A hummock is an
accumulation of overlapping patches of ice on an ice pack.