On the occasion of the 18th Festival des Architectures Vives, the Champ Libre association is launching an open call to create 1 of the 10 interventions of the Festival in Montpellier.

The Festival takes place in the heart of the city of Montpellier, in the Ecusson, and more specifically in courtyards of certain mansions, thus offering a visitors a sort of architectural discovery route.

One one hand, the objective of FAV Montpellier is to open these emblematic places to visitors during the festival, and on the other hand, thanks to the intervention of teams of architects who will present a specific work in each place, to reveal an intimate relationship between contemporary architecture, an installation, and a heritage site.

Theme: Rhythm

2024, the Olympic year in Paris, is an opportunity to re-examine the relationship that architecture has with the body, performance, discipline, and the movements and structures resulting from it. Sport has long been closely linked to the arts and literature. The theorization of this relationship dates back to antiquity and was perpetuated by Pierre de Coubertin during a revamping of the Olympic Games, who wanted to prolong the thought of the Greek philosophers according to which the body and the mind are inseparable. For example, until the mid-20th century, artists could claim the title of Olympic champion in five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

In various forms, the movement has traversed the pictorial arts over time; from the paintings of Chauvet’s cave, through the Baroque, Futurist, Impressionist, and Action Painting eras, to the kinetic art of artist Daniel Spoerri, giving the illusion that everything moves, while nothing moves.

Closer to home, Bernard Tschumi affirms that "there is no architecture without movement in space”, affirming what he has extensively and previously experienced through the “notations” in which he highlights, by means of diagrams and other photograms, the complex relationship between space, time, movement, and event. However, for Tschumi, the movement is that of the protagonists moving in a space. The deepening of this notion of kinematics will surely allow us to grasp movement in architecture, which is by nature static.

By accurately visualizing the decomposition and variation of the athletes' movements, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, and then of Eadweard Muybridge, made it possible to understand their functioning. This technique combines discontinuities in flow between scientific accuracy and poetic and aesthetic reverie, giving the illusion of movement.

Composed of a succession of more or less long sequences that follow each other at a particular cadence, each movement, thanks to its singular variations, has its own unique rhythm. For musician John Cage, "Rhythm is a fundamental matter; it is the structure of time." More generally, rhythm is perhaps that cadence which certainly animates the movement, structures the time, and composes the space.

In this case, FAV allows us to explore the ability of these new vibrant architectures through their own compositions and rhythms, and to resonate with the space and envelope of the courtyards that welcome them, each of which has its own particular arrangement. It will also be an opportunity to experiment with how the ways in which one travels establishes a dialogue with the visitor, and constitutes a “vector” of architecture, such as a dynamic giving the opportunity to create an event.

Malek DAHBI, Architect, Senior Lecturer