With Dominique Perrault, the Urban Planning and Architecture Forum of the City of Nice invites a figure of French architecture who has made a mark on the international scene after winning the competition for the National Library of France in 1989. Among his many major recent achievements are the Olympic Tennis Center and the redevelopment of the Manzanares Park in Madrid (2002), the Ewha Womans University campus in Seoul (2004), and the Fukoku Tower in Osaka (2007).
For Dominique Perrault, the incessant transformation of territories has resulted in increased complexity, disparity, fragmentation, and density. These territories can no longer be content with a single architecture, whose terminology would be reduced to the words walls, doors, facades, and roofs. The material of architecture today is the territory as it exists, as it is infiltrated, and as it is traversed. Dominique Perrault’s approach of transfiguring landscapes and territories means his work as an architect is inseparable from that of an urban planner.
While an urban project in Nice is being conceived and implemented, asserting its coherence on the scale of a vast territory, this conference will shed light on the challenges of such a method for thinking about the city on a metropolitan scale, as a prelude to the autumn program of the Urban Planning and Architecture Forum, which will delve deeper into these questions.
-A member of the scientific council of the Grand Paris, Dominique Perrault has received prestigious honors, including the Grande Mรฉdaille d’Or of Architecture from the Academy of Architecture, the Mies van der Rohe Award, the National Grand Prix of Architecture, and the Silver Square. His work was the subject of a monographic exhibition, “Dominique Perrault Architecture,” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2008.
