Frédéric Bonnet
In his lecture A Tribute to Ordinary Architecture, Frédéric Bonnet says: “Losing responsiveness towards others, curiosity and the desire for otherness means losing the very spirit of contemporary Europe. For architecture it means giving up”.
Addressing the lack of welcome received by millions of migrants and refugees as they entered into Europe, he makes the case for FREESPACE where new social bonds and a sense of citizenship can be fostered. Operating as an architect, landscape architect, historian and professor, Bonnet has a uniquely broad and scholarly overview of the world which manifests itself in the richness of his own work and in the work of his students.
For this Biennale Architettura he presents a piece of the Ticino landscape in model form, a kind of detached organism under scrutiny. The student Atelier provides a much-needed alternative method of masterplanning where “each intervention sometimes modest, sometimes heroic, sometimes monumental and singular, sometimes quite ordinary, fulfils its own precise goal”. The work of the Atelier and of OBRAS presented here together, is a wonderful testament to the capacity of architecture to concurrently “gather all territorial dimensions” and to address and promote a sense of humanity and generosity at all scales, from the most modest to the heroic.
YF+SMcN