From now on, find our works exclusively on BETILLON / DORVAL-BORY

I’m currently leading an interesting introductory project to architecture in a small middle school of a lower-class neighborhood, the cité de Grand Vaux. The project seeks to teach the architectural conception of a sustainable small public library to grade 7 pupils.

An interesting article has been published in this week (13/10/2010) french magazine Les Inrockuptibles by architect Philippe Rahm, where he explains his interpretation of the work of Claude Monet and in which I am briefly named along with other artists and architects.
The article:

We thought we were the grandchildren of Duchamp, and we discover that in reality we are descendants of Claude Monet. We were taught to distrust science, and here we rediscover an artist engaged with the scientific avant-garde of his time, working on the principle of colors optical mix of Charles Blanc, or the law of simultaneous contrast theorized by Michel-Eugène Chevreul. In a current analysis of the vaporized and meteorological work of Claude Monet, a possibility exists to draw another genealogy of French contemporary art, which would go back up, through spectral music and Nouveau Roman, in a straight line to the Impressionists ( cf. Révolutions Sonores by Guy Lelong, MF Editions, 2010). What matters most is not the subject but the shapes that may arise from analytical dissociation of the methods we work with. We explore the infinitely small, we analyze the optical or sound spectra, we decompose reality into visual, electromagnetic or thermal particles, then we recompose it, but with a number of its elements, not all of them. In all these works, there is a sort of French light, this rational brightness of the Enlightenment, the whiteness of writing, this almost chemical objectivity, a lack of narrative, but from which emerges something magical, a “disturbing unreality”, related to “a further realism more than a deliberate fiction” as Gerard Genette said about Robbe-Grillet. Today, a number of our work are coming within the scope of this descent : those of architects Berger&Berger or Nicolas Dorval-Bory, designer Mathieu Lehanneur, artists Loris Gréaud and Laurent Grasso. I am an impressionist too.

Philippe Rahm

Raphaël Bétillon and I joined forces to form our new office, called Bétillon / Dorval-Bory.

Our website is still under construction.

Back in Buenos Aires a few months ago, I produced for new architecture magazine PLOT a photographical documentary about the “conjunto Los Andes”, a social housing complex built by architect Fermin Bereterbide in 1927.

PAYSAGES EN EXIL from Nicolas Dorval-Bory on Vimeo.

In order to take better care of its european projects, the office left Buenos Aires in June for good. We are settling again in Paris in September.

We hope that new projects will lead us again in South America!

Submitted a few weeks ago to a call for artistic projects for the national event “Imaginez Maintenant”, our (Raphaël Bétillon and me) project PAYSAGES EN EXIL has just been accepted by the comitee and will therefore be build in Toulouse in July 2010.

Along with the team of the Galpón, we won the 1st mention in the competition for the Argentinian Pavilion in the Frankfurt book fair in 2010. The team was composed of Max Zolkwer, Gustavo Nielsen, Sebastián Marsiglia and me, with the collaboration de Laura Di Chello. More infos on my blog.

Emilio Marin, Juan-Carlos Lopez Huerta and me received a special mention/3rd prize for our project in a competition for a house in the mountains for the firm Xella Chile, specialised in aerated concrete blocks.

More about the project : SNOW HOUSE