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Noël Picaper

Architecture / Landscape architecture / Urbanism
Apr. 
 Jul. 2024

Presentation

Noël Picaper is a Paris-based architect. After working in Switzerland, Japan, and France, he founded onomiau in 2020, a multidisciplinary studio whose work spans public pavilions, private commissions, urban and landscape research, exhibitions, teaching, and fiction.

Interested in the rituals and hidden qualities of places, he develops projects that blur conventional boundaries between building and landscape, life and death, furniture and sculpture, and the natural and the artificial. Drawing on ordinary forms and simple geometries, his work gives rise to unexpected spatial experiences. By engaging with the landscapes they inhabit, his projects seek to reveal dimensions of a site that might otherwise remain unseen.

Project

Yakitecture, notes sur une architecture de la combustion (Yakitecture, notes on an architecture of combustion)

Noël Picaper explores the relationships between architecture and fire in Japan. From incandescent rituals to charcoal-based construction materials, combustion tells of different ways of inhabiting the world. From both a symbolic and technical perspective, conflagration sparks a narrative that instantly brings together future desires and ancient times.

At Villa Kujoyama, Picaper observes and notes Japanese assemblies and spatialities which govern figures and gestures that are linked to flames (restoration, onsen, tea pavilion, ceremonies, ghosts and demons, yakisugi, yakihata, heating devices, etc.). He then considers these systems in terms of a possible actualisation. Picaper, who has a particular interest in the creation of pavilions and public space, sets out to formulate hypotheses that can awaken the dormant elements in the environments we traverse. These reflections on combustion are an opportunity for him to develop a peculiar architectural language – in keeping with the directions his practice takes – in which archaisms and contemporaneity dialogue through archetypes, signs and rites.

Post-residency

MOHITORI

Between 2024 and 2025, Noël Picaper (2024, architecture), together with Yurakucho Art Urbanism (YAU), carried out the “MOHITORI” project, which brings to light the subtle traces of water flowing through Japan’s public spaces.

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Crédits

Photos :

©Onomiau

Events with this resident