This exhibition, which brings together some 250 drawings and models from among the FRAC Centre’s most emblematic projects, offers a broad overview of architectural and urban experimentation, from the 1950s to now.
In 1960s Europe, a movement called “radical architecture” emerged. It aimed to go beyond architecture as a discipline by opening it up to conceptual and artistic practices. In the hands of radical groups, from Archigram to Superstudio, and Haus-Rucker-Co to Archizoom, who designed for every scale, from the house to the urban plan, architecture no longer comes across as a built object but as a perpetually reconfiguring environment, at one with the time of action.
Taking Guy Debord’s guide psychogéographique (1957) and Archigram’s project for an Instant City (1969), the exhibition opens with the idea of “mobility”, presenting an ephemeral and nomadic utopian city, animated by the flow of communication and constantly generating events.
In 1950s and ’60s Europe, exploration of mobility in architecture led to the definition of a new kind of space, organised round the modularity, proliferation and agglomeration of pods (MOBILE CITY). First there was Ionel Schein, with his plastic house. Then came Pascal Haüsermann, Chanéac and Antti Lovag, who developed assembly systems of autonomous pods connected to each other to form constantly reconfiguring urban agglomerations.
The “bubble” came to be an emblem of this organic and modular architecture without foundation (BUBBLE CITY). David Georges Emmerich’s research into the morphology of self-tensile structures contributed to the development of inflatable buildings, and this same ’60s Europe saw the spread of “air” architecture (Coop Himmelblau in Austria, the Utopie group in France, Arthur Quarmby in the UK). But mobility refers to that of inhabitants too; thus the Architecture-Principe group (Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, 1963-1968) insisted on the need for an architecture of movement in which “habitable circulation” would be encouraged by sloping planes and systems of ramps (OBLIQUE CITY).
As early as 1958, Yona Friedman designed a project for a global city in response to the emerging crisis of modern urbanism. “Spatial cities,” perched on stilts and containing inhabited volumes were to proliferate over several levels based on a three-dimensional structure. The ’60s and ’70s also saw an increasing number of projects for “megastructure” cities, defined by their capacity for infinite expansion, the principle of modularity and free planning by means of an open framework (Huth & Domenig). In all these projects, the reliance on systematic form, e.g. the urban grid or framework, was employed in the service of a spatial organisation in search of an egalitarian ideal - a social aspiration characteristic of the period - which also shows up in the complex geometric spatial compositions of Jean Renaudie or Renée Gailhoustet (GEOMETRIC CITY).
In the 1980s and 1990s, international architecture was able to contribute to strengthening the critical capacity of the architecture referred to as “deconstruction”. Under the influence of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, certain American and European architects, among whom Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind, emphasised the theoretical activity and the conceptual dimension of the project. Freed in this way from the programme, architecture comes across as the exploration of a language. Architecture once again lays claim to the notion of the event, of formal and temporal “disjunction”.
Moving beyond deconstruction and betting on the potential for exploration offered by digital tools, a new  generation emerged in the late 1990s, producing “intelligent” architecture, both interactive (Nox, ONL/Oosterhuis.nl), in perpetual mutation (Dagmar Richter) and generating forms that draw on the dynamism and tension of the elements (Asymptote, KOL/MAC LLC). The ArchiLab show, first launched by Frédéric Migayrou in 1999 in Orleans, has greatly contributed to raising awareness in France of this new generation of architects focused on research at the international level.

Entirely new design and production processes are made possible by today’s computer-driven manufacturing techniques and rapid prototyping machines. Complex topological spaces, emerging from engineering, biology and genetics, are transforming architecture, which is now viewed as a dynamic form, existing between materiality and potentiality, open to the interaction of its users and to environmental, ecological or micro-climatic conditions.