For the next couple of months, the quiet architectural harmony of the château and city of Versailles – built of beige pierre de taille (Paris cut stone) – will be disrupted by splashes of brilliant taxi-cab yellow, the color of the signs marking the exhibitions associated with the city’s 2025 Architecture and Landscape Biennial (Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage, or BAP!).
The theme of this year’s BAP! is “La Ville Vivante” (“The Living City”). Five main exhibitions and four photo exhibitions are being held in spaces throughout the city to look at ways urban areas can rethink their architecture in terms of energy efficiency, as well as how people inhabit them and interact with nature in the era of climate change.
Held in collaboration with the city’s famed Écoles Nationales Supérieures d’Architecture et de Paysage (ENSP), the free exhibitions were developed by internationally renowned architects and landscape architects.
The most obvious to visitors to the château is the “La Petite Agora,” a pavilion built of wood, designed by architect Jean-Christophe Quinton, a sort of simplified Art Deco “cathedral” set squarely across from the main entrance to the château. The structure, built with sustainable wood construction techniques, is fitted with bleachers, providing a space for conferences on the future of the urban landscapes and offering visitors a place to sit and rest while enjoying a horizontal view of the château through its front window and a vertical view of the Avenue de Paris through the tall vertical opening in the back. When BAP! is over, the Agora will not be destroyed but moved to another location.
Another exhibition is being held in a special part of the château complex: the Potager du Roi (the King’s Kitchen Garden), where students of ENSP can tend the fruits and vegetables on small plots and experiment with eco-friendly techniques in between their studies. For the exhibition, instead of displaying information on vertical panels, which would interrupt the gorgeous views of the garden, the sky and the château in the background, Agence Ter, a Paris-based firm of landscape architects, has found an innovative way to present its exhibition “Nous… le Climat” (“Us… the Climate”). A table painted BAP!’s bright yellow signature color stretches the length of the garden, continuing over the pool in the center – visitors must remove their shoes and walk across the water if they want to examine this part of the show, which presents many of the agency’s projects focusing on the rehabilitation of “dead” soil to bring back the plant, animal and insect life that depends on the soil and at the same time provide a pleasurable environment for human visitors.
One of the most interesting exhibitions for non-professionals examines the concept of “repairing, transforming, and adapting” cities to combat the effects of climate disruptions. According to recent predictions, France could see temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, bringing suffocating heat in the summer, extended droughts and tropical storms as the city moves from a temperate climate to one more akin to the subtropical regions of Mexico or Southern Europe. The exhibition “4°C Between You and Me” looks to those southern claims for inspiration and presents architectural solutions inspired by semi-arid, Mediterranean and tropical climates. The imaginative projects on display include intriguing models that help explain each concept.
Another highlight is the exhibition “Changer les Climats” (“Changing Climates”), held in the charming 18th-century Musée Lambinet, featuring the projects of the firm of Belgian landscape artist Bas Smets, who was chosen to design the outdoor areas around the renovated Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The exhibits show how a site like Luma Arles, a cultural center dominated by a striking building by Frank Gehry and built on a former industrial wasteland, can be transformed from a virtual concrete desert by taking advantage of natural features of the landscape and planting trees and shrubs to provide shade during the summer and protection from wind during the winter.
Nicolas Davy’s wonderful photo exhibition in a courtyard, “Quand la Ville Dort” (While the City Sleeps), shows us what goes on in cities at night unbeknownst to us, when nocturnal animals take advantage of the darkness to come out of their hiding places, only to be revealed by the artificial lights of our cities. In one, a boar silhouetted by automobile headlights runs across the road to escape danger. In another, an owl sits on a wooden post, “her invisibility stolen by the headlights of a passing car.”
At the press conference preceding a visit to the biennial, presided over by François de Mazières, mayor of Versailles and general curator of the biennial, one journalist shouted out “Environment environment! Where’s the architecture?” It’s true that there was not much emphasis on architecture per se, except perhaps at the La Petite Agora, but that seems totally justified in the face of the pressing climate concerns the world is facing at the moment. Today, those concerns have to be taken into consideration when building new structures or renovating old ones. Most of the exhibitions focused on inspirations for and examples of environmentally sound architecture. There is much to learn here for both professionals and the public.
See our list of Current & Upcoming Exhibitions to find out what else is happening in the Paris art world.
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