Architects:BUREAU

Area:24 m²

Year:2022

Photographs:Dylan Perrenoud

Lead Architects:Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbid

Concept Design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger

Project Execution: Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger, Laëtitia Chauveau, Malak Abdelhady

Construction Supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide

Publication Drawings: Malak Abdelhady, Rui Da Silva

City: Le Chenit

Country: Switzerland

Plaster, the extracted form of gypsum, essentially composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate, appears as a good figuration of the BUREAU’s general attitude towards architecture. If we were to define ourselves as minor architects, following Jill Stoner’s book «Towards a minor architecture», working with what is considered a minor material seems quite d'à-propos. It is one that has been utilized to prefigure and anticipate masterpieces in the numerous “galéries des plâtres” around the world, fabricating figurative positive molds of definite sculptures, forever “graved in stone”. The plaster seems more malleable, elastic, and fragile.

It also possesses the ability to trigger mythological reveries as gypsum’s synonym is selenite, a mineral that has filled many wondrous stories. La Cueva de los Cristales in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico, materializes the dreamy spheres of Selene, goddess of the moon.

The seemingly banal construction material hides many facets of a rich life, whether as a fundamental discrete companion of Rodin and so many others, as a crystal, or as a mental scape beyond the world and in mythological orbits. In yet another form, the material is used for bone fractures, soft tissue injuries, orthopedic diseases, and inflammatory processes, to bring peace and rest to wounded parts of the body.

In 1939, Salvador Dalí participated in the World of the Tomorrow, a world’s fair that featured the future, with prospective designs from SOM, Norman Bel Geddes, and other modernists and visionaries of the time. Dalí provoked the streamlined futuristic foresight of those avant-garde actors with a surrealist tone and he made it so with a plaster-like architecture anticipating thus installation art, Gesamtkunstwerk works that would largely populate the 20th-century art world.

His intervention, an oneiric pavilion, freely reenacts Botticelli’s painting of Venus and transforms it into a three-dimensional and total experience. It constituted a minor major piece of architecture that found its way to New York with the advice of no other than William Morris, father of socialist utopias and wallpapers.

A much smaller scale and other rather trivial historical circumstances confront the modest plaster to a luxurious context designed by a recognized modernist corporate practice of our time: Bjarke Ingels Group. In an exhibition dedicated to the very presence of materials and their transformation, the art pieces of Nina Beier, Latifa Echakhch, Raphael Hefti, Olivier Laric, and Christodoulos Panayiotou (among others), are found in a cave condition that the viewer discovers by diving into a seemingly undefined white grotto.