Until March 13, the Urban Planning Forum of the City of Nice invites you to discover the exhibition “Variations Arman, orchestrated by Guy Rottier” at the 109.
In 2017, the City of Nice received a deposit of nearly eight thousand documents representing the personal archives of the architect Guy Rottier, a companion on the road with many visionary architects and artists from the fertile decades of the 60s and 70s. This opened the way for an inventory, protection, and enhancement work through an exhibition policy. “Variations Arman, orchestrated by Guy Rottier” is thus the third exhibition to present often unseen pieces that had remained within the family circle until now.
After “Guy Rottier, Archives of the Future,” the first unveiling of these archives in 2017/2018, and in contrast to the very large corpus of that initial exhibition (which showed a general sampling of this Nice architect’s work), the choice was made here to focus on a single project to analyze in depth, using an iconic example, the construction of an architectural thought.
The challenge was to draw from a mass of documents the dynamic story of an intellectual and human adventure. Within this storytelling idea, the house that Guy Rottier designed for sculptor Arman, at the turn of the 60s and 70s, appeared to be the ideal subject to take on this role as a study object, highlighting the construction of the thought process that gave it form and reality.
Indeed, this realization is richly documented by sketches, plans, or correspondences between the architect and his client or between the architect and the companies in charge of construction, as well as by photographs or filmed interviews. All of these illustrate the overall mechanics of ideas, constraints, and technical cultures of which the finalized project represents a point of balance and/or compromise.
But even more, this project adventure, treated here under the theme of musical variation, given the successive drawings and revisions, was an undertaking on the scale of its protagonists: a singular client whose fame as an artist was growing, impacting his working relationship with the architect, and an exceptional designer living a pivotal moment in his creative commitment and production.
