Architect Noël Picaper is a 2016 graduate of École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture (ENSA) in Strasbourg. Having worked in Switzerland, Japan and France, in 2019 he set up Onomiau, an architecture and design practice with which he navigates among various formats, for example public pavilions, individual constructions, urban and landscape studies, exhibitions, teaching and fiction.
Alert to Earth’s cycles and rituals, Picaper devotes part of his research to strange architectures which, for a brief instant, intensify a space’s qualities and transform users into explorers. Often modest in size, these structures condense worlds and exhibit their vulnerability as an essential quality. Their position and involvement in public space, and the pedagogies they inspire, make them spaces which can resonate on a territorial scale. They appear and disappear like ghosts, leaving behind traces of a discreet, sometimes invisible yet essential present.
