In its seventeenth issue, Le Visiteur presents the work of a major architect of our time. Anchored deep in the landscape of the Iberian Baroque, with its undulating style and traditional motifs that radiate the spirit of their Portuguese builders, the work of João Luís Carrilho da Graça offers the tranquility of the pure surface. The difficult art of simplicity, the art of restraint that Carrilho cultivates, seems to disengage his projects from the present moment. They contrast sharply with the idle chatter that so often dominates today, and stay far away from fashionable ornamentalism of the kind that goes no deeper than a building’s envelope. His projects have a timeless, hieratic character, exhibiting a degree of caution with respect to their immediate context and searching instead for the age-old figures of architecture, the archetypes to be found within each building.

At the School of Music and the Pavilion of Knowledge of the Seas in Lisbon, Carrilho reinterprets the model of the cloister: an opaque, enclosed space blocks the view to the outside, only in order to restore it through occasional gaps, judiciously positioned. In the Belém Palace Documentation Center, he gives new life to the theme of the wall, in the solemn, almost sacred, form of a white rectangle hanging above a moat like a black chasm, with the program located behind and below it.

The dossier devoted here to Carrilho’s work, with contributions by Laurent Beaudouin, Judith Rotbart and Laurent Salomon, and Victor Diniz, is the first critical appraisal in French of this Portuguese architect.

The second section of this issue presents a group of texts from the recent “Theory and project” conference.[1] At a time when theory sometimes seems to be taking the place of the project, to the advantage of neither one, we sought to assess the current relationship of thought to project creation.

In much contemporary architecture, theory arises in the pointless yet obsessive guise of the “conceptual.” In my own paper I seek to show how discourse has taken control of the design process, and to assess the consequences for architecture as a discipline. Michael Hays in turn discusses what he sees as an anti-theoretical step backwards; invoking Jacques Lacan and Theodor Adorno, he argues that this leads to the end of the “Other” in architecture. Philippe Potié probes the roots of the word “theory,” uncovering the link between oracular speech and aphoristic thought. Mario Carpo’s critique of computer-based modeling techniques seeks to unmask, behind the apparent variety of options that digital modeling offers, a loss of control of their morphogenesis on the part of architects. Antoine Picon brings up the question of ornament, comparing two different concepts, the traditional one and that resulting from the application of digital technologies. In a discussion of the Pavilion of Man in Zurich, Olivier Gahinet seeks to demonstrate that analysis is also intrinsic to the project. Through the examination of a central though little explored topic in architecture and architectural theory, he makes us see Le Corbusier’s late work with new eyes: the topic in question is the underside, with all its implications for scale, program, form, and matter. Pierre Caye addresses the double life of theory, or rather the double use made of it: on the one hand, a palliative function that seeks to compensate for architecture’s powerlessness, and on the other the Word, whose task is to bring the act of construction to fruition.

The fruitful alliance between theory and the project can also be illustrated by the unique output of some particular architects. We have chosen in this issue to pay tribute to Michel Kagan, through the words of two of his brothers in arms, Laurent Salomon and Franco Purini, who both recall his importance as an architect and his place in the history of the field.

In the closing section, Paolo Amaldi discusses Alvar Aalto’s designs for the Technical University in Otaniemi, giving a precise and subtle spatial analysis of that work. And Claude Prélorenzo introduces us to Le Corbusier’s forays into cinema, which ever since 1937 have lain dormant in the archives of that sharp-eyed lover of everyday life.

---

[1] This conference was held on May 6 and 7 2011, organized by the Société française des architectes and the CNRS, with the support of the Urbaine de Travaux.