‘Magasin/
Magazine’
MAGASIN/MAGAZINE
13 Dec 2023 — 31 Jan 2024
Académie des beaux-arts, Paris
within the exhibition Émulations
curated by Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Benjamin Lafore and Sébastien Martinez-Barat.
planted model, 240 x 80 cm
7 mock-ups, various materials
a 280-page fanzine
MAGASIN/MAGAZINE
aims to transform a rural building into a ‘place to write and make things’ through a series of specific architectural interventions, based on one-off collaborations that mobilize different sensibilities, materials, knowledge and know-how, like the contents of a magazine. The project stems indeed from the challenge of developing an architectural project with the same editorial method as Accattone, where contributions are developed separately, in collaboration with guest practitioners, while resonating with one another.
Moving from the space of the page to the built environment, the project explores the figure of the architect-editor as practitioner: ‘To the concept of invention we prefer that of a conscious, creative and critical use of existing materials, where by “materials” we refer to both the ideas of our contemporaries and those that have gone before us, the manifold products of our culture as well as the anonymous artefacts that populate our territories. We are architect-editors. Our work insists on activating a network of relations among materials that end up feeding each other around a common project. It starts with the existing, selects it, arranges it, takes care of it, “curates” it, transforms it.’
The building is situated in Parfondeval, France. It is already inhabitable, but it lacks the equipment to expand its publicity and sustain a general drive to ‘make thinks’. Therefore, the seven interventions consist in an ‘Equipped Façade’ (icw Alice Paris), a ‘Useful Post’ (icw Arnaud Depeyre), an ‘Augmented Wall’ (icw Anne Grøtte Viken), a ‘Mutant Garden’ (icw Éléonore Morand), a ‘Deviated Gutter’ (icw Rosa Fens and Nomi Schrauwen), a ‘Polished Pond’ (icw Elmēs) and an ‘Oven’ (icw Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers & Clémentine Vaultier).
aumented wall / mur augmenté
annee grøtte viken in collaboration with Accattonedummy vessel (paris)
material, simulation
The Dummy Vessel is a wattle and daub simulation of a real world environment in Parvondeval enhanced with rubber, pigment, ropes, metal hooks together with a mock-dish in clay painted to imitate wood. It is made up of a framework of wooden pine beams and horizontal sticks woven with left over plywood strips and covered in a mixture of clay, sand, water, hay and pigments. Wattle is wooden lattice and daub the mixture of mud plaster applied to it. The composite technique dates back several thousand years and is the material predecessor of lath-and-plaster and today’s plasterboard. The Dummy Vessel has been made with readily available materials and fitted with functional hi-tech equipment from the local hard-ware store. One side of the pinewood frame has been painted in an apricot-like base colour using the pigments mars red, burnt Sienna and titan white producing a tint used in the crafts of decorative painting when imitating Thuja, a once exotic wood, today widely known as a trimmed hedge. The dummy vessel is made complete by a “mock-dish”, a solid miniature vase made of air-drying clay painted as a Thuja burl imitation using earth pigments and water fixated with linseed oil. The dummy vessel and the mock dish combine industrial manufacturing and traditional materials with local know-how, ‘learning by doing’ and craftsmanship. They are material representations of a proposal for an augmented wall in the barn on the farm in Parvondeval. Objects of material experimentations made to be magically equivalent to the real thing. Displayed in the exhibition as concrete matter effective in the present with the hopes for the future. In ancient civilisations dummy vessels, model vessels, miniature vessels, model foodstuffs or mock dishes were funerary objects offered to ensure life in the next world, a world often depicted as luscious, abundant agricultural lands.
augmented wall (parvondeval) cultivation, preservation, hibernation
The augmented wall in Parvondeval is positioned in the barn, a former granary, filling the stretch of wall facing south. Cheap, mouldable lumps are dug out of the ground, mixed with sand and hay and put into walls. The mixture make a thermal mass that conducts heat and cold, that absorb, store and release energy. It makes the barn breathe. Inside it is reimagined as a granary, a space with pockets to preserve grains. The wall doubles as storage space through its frame fitted with hooks and bars that can hold tools, shelves, foldable tables and other equipment. The mixture of clay morph into the floor and fill the gaps between existing terracotta tiles and turn into a vegetable storage underground. On the other side facing out, half of the augmented wall make up the back wall of a greenhouse where its thermal properties cater for growing plants and cultivating seeds activated by a greenhouse glass facade regulated by a moveable cover. The other half of the wall facing out is mostly covered by the original cladding, a bricolage of thin wooden boards treated with thick black car oil. The space in front of it make up an open hallway for drying clothes. At the top of the wall the clay is exposed, it is perforated for air flow and has holes for birds to nest and insects to take shelter. The facade face a series of potential fruit walls that bends around existing trees and in between the two sides you have the passage going from the entrance of the farm by the road to its garden in the back.
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Conceived by Accattone editors Sophie Dars and Carlo Menon, the project is part of the exhibition Émulations, curated by Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Benjamin Lafore and Sébastien Martinez-Barat at Académie des beaux-arts, Paris. The exhibition also displays the three other original projects retained after a competition on the theme of ‘Écriture’ (Writing): ‘Spolia’ by Estelle Barriol / Studio ACTE, ‘L’attrape-rêves’ by CompMonksand ‘L’Usage de l’Espace’ by Max Turnheim. ‘Magasin/Magazine’ was awarded the Prix Charles Abella.
A project by Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon (Accattone)
Guest architects and artists: Arnaud Depeyre & Éléonore Morand (Depeyre-Morand Architectures); Rosa Fens & Nomi Schrauwen; Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers & Clémentine Vaultier; Annee Grøtte Viken; Vinh Linh, Thomas Mertens & Jochen Schamelhout (Elmēs); Alice Paris
Collaboration: Julien Jacob, Alice Paris
Model: Hugo D’Oliveira
Plants: Plant & Houtgoed
Metal work: L’Atelier Pirate
Binding: Ellen Van Huffel
Thanks to Central ofaau, Le Carré Noir, Ferre Marnef, Faculté d’architecture La Cambre Horta. Produced with the support of Wallonie-Bruxelles International and WB Architectures.
https://accattone.be/magasin-magazine/
https://www.academiedesbeauxarts.fr/concours-darchitecture-de-lacademie-des-beaux-arts-2023