Gilles Delalex

Sarah Joseph:

We see that your firm has been selected to curate the French Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Can you give us any insight on your plans for this and what we can expect to see for this installation? What we proposed to do is a theater. The French Pavilion is a neo-classical building and usually hosts exhibitions. We found that an exhibition, for us, usually looks back into the past. With an installation you want it to look towards the future. Which is the general theme of the Biennale this year: “Architecture as a Laboratory of the Future.” The idea behind the theater is that it tries to recover the notion of Utopia. We are in a world of crisis and there is a strong feeling of crisis with any movement, ecology, economics, gender or whatever. Crisis is everywhere. I think that the main way to deal with it at the moment is urgency and the main way to find it is to act now and look elsewhere at the ideas of different worlds. This is very difficult for anybody today because utopia is the other world we can look at and brings a critical view of our own world and utopia has died in the 20th Century because it was linked to the future. The great utopian political ideas and attempts have died. So we are left with no future today. We don’t know where to look and when we see forward, we see nothing. The future is tomorrow and tomorrow is already the future, but it’s quite short. We thought that we should make a place to reflect on that and not work on a theme where all of the questions are already answered. When you talk about ecology for instance, everyone already knows the answers. Today, we agree that no one asks questions about what we should do. No one wants to raise the questions because they are just too dangerous and so here we are. We aim to create a theater where questions can be raised.

Aaron Muth:

Yves Moreau explains how your firm has a ‘flat, horizontal way of working where everybody can manage and work on all parts at the same time, rather than having a pyramid system.’ What benefits as a whole do you see from this horizontal system, and inversely, what are the downsides to not having a typical pyramid structure?

Well when we started the office we were three, so we were both vertical and horizontal. I think we quite like the idea of horizontality for the fact that opportunities can come from anywhere or any place. We are not responsible for the whole entirety. However, in architecture you sign the building and you are responsible for it, so there’s a kind of verticality. I guess there is always something vertical and something horizontal. The horizontality is a wish to distribute the work; it’s a condition of emergence of things that we like. The everyday practice requires a lot of authority. There is always a mix of power and weakness, with weakness being the horizontal part and power being the vertical.

Madeline Fulk:

You seem to have a large interest in public architecture. Beyond it being a space for the public, what does ‘public Architecture’ mean to you and what elements make a public project successful?

We started with mainly public buildings, and have now shifted onto more private commissions because time changes. The strange thing when you make a public building is that your client, somehow, is the public. It’s a ghost. You don’t know what the public is. It is sort of an invisible collective force that is here, it is just potential. You don’t know who you are building it for and you don’t know who is going into it.

You have to imagine sort of a collective thing that is going to define the building. So, we started thinking of what the public was and what makes architecture a public thing. We thought maybe we should not oppose public architecture, like housing to public infrastructure, for instance. Housing can have a certain kind of publicness. There is an objective and a specific quality of publicness. Publicness is something that participates in the life of the city somewhere as a citizen. You put a building in the city and somehow it plays a role in public life. It’s important if it’s here. If it wasn’t here, it would be different. It’s like a character. If the building has that role, then somehow it’s public. Most of the buildings today play no role. Whether they’re here or not, it wouldn’t change anything. The question is not whether it is financed by private money or public money, it really is the vocation of the building and the thought that makes it public or not.

For instance, traditionally a stadium in France would be a public place. I don’t think it would be the case in America, in the States. I would say most stadiums are private, but they’re not so different. The difference is not necessarily who pays for it, it’s about the vocation of the building itself. I prefer leaving the question open as to know what the building is exactly.

Madeleine Craven:

I am interested in the way you view public versus private. Seeing how you were more interested in public competitions, but now are focusing more on public work. Is there a reason why you switched and do you see yourself immersing into the public commissions in the future? We switched because the French Government is right wing now more than ever. This means public competitions within France decreased a fair amount, more than half the public competitions are gone. As an office we grew because of the public competitions, they were paid and it helped young teams. When the system changed and new partnerships were made, we started doing buildings that were different. Not only private necessarily, but different configurations and political context. Going back to your question, it is about how public and private connect today. They need each other but the configurations of those buildings are totally different. There are national traditions as to how the public and private work together. In France, city mayors are elected for five years, maybe more if they are reelected. They have immense power which shapes the context and allows them to decide everything. They can start a competition in those five years, but when the next mayor is reelected they have the power to shut it down. Five years is not enough to make a building. Architecture takes time. This gives us the idea that architecture is shaping itself through different terms. We have projects that have been with us for five to six years and we do not know if they are going to get built, it was more clear before. Now the configuration between public and private has to learn from each other. The private is responsible for the public good and they have to figure out a way to cooperate or share.

Dustin Moore:

I’ve read a lot about how your firm involves not only architecture, but the arts and artistic skills as well. I study architecture, but also art history, so I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts as to how the two connect with each other. How does art fit into our buildings today?

I would say when we started, it was more between art and research. Architecture came later. We’ve tried to work with artists who we felt very connected to. That is a new thing that we have been trying to do. It’s a way of letting in other influences. For instance, for the Biennale project we realized that it was easier to find partners who were working initially within the arts, than architecture because we didn’t have a discourse going with it. As I said, when you work with architecture, you need to bring answers and when you work in the arts I think questions are a lot more favored and given more value. That is the connection we are making. I would say the difference between artists and architects is that artists carry the program. Usually you have a book, it’s called the program. The artists wear it on their back. They have a backpack. They have their own program so wherever they go, they would say, “I can do that here.” For us architects, since we are always given the program, we tend to think we don’t need one. I think we do. Since architects are not trained with that thought process, I think it’s nice to work with artists who have an idea of what to do anywhere. They have this capacity not to work with a base.

Jamie Spangler:

In an article you wrote for Pavillon De L’Arsenal you stated, “Architecture only becomes liberating through the way we use it.” You also referred to