ORLÉANS .- Since 1991 the Frac Centre-Val de Loire has used its collection to establish itself as a space dedicated to the relationship between art and architecture with an experimental dimension. Working both retrospectively or prospectively over the last sixty years to enrich the collection has resulted in a collection of art and divers projects that form a unique and innovative heritage. Thanks to the successive editions of the ArchiLab Festival (Rencontres internationales d’architecture d’Orléans), the Frac Centre-Val de Loire has become a major player on the international scene. Inspired by its rich heritage, the first edition of the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans will present an intersecting vision from over forty contemporary architects working on building a shared world, a world of proximities. The aim is to question these architects, to ask them to tell us how they envision walking in our dreams and fears.

The end of the modern project to “build the world” has made way for an era in which any normative model or unifying vision is no longer valid. In a system of proximities where no site remains, but where any locality – perfectly connected and visible – instantly and straightforwardly falls within a totality, is it possible to elaborate shared narratives?

How can we build proximities, construct memory, and continue to dream of all that is possible in the future? How can architecture, without falling into immediateness, so it no longer “shelters us from the world”, but rather transports us to a shelter in the world, with all its uncertainty and fragility?

The question of architecture is not only formalism or technical know how. It must answer the broader question of “making the world”. Architecture has every reason to take into account the state of the world, as it takes part in its configuration: the human world is constructed to be inhabited. A mutating world faces architects with a problem of vast discontinuity: while populations develop and grow, they also break old structures and feed enormous megalopolises to the detriment of massive deserted regions. There in lies the precise challenge for architecture today, as it becomes, now more than ever, a discipline made for cohabitation: reality and fiction / migrations and sedentariness / the blurring of frontiers / building walls, / achieving / experimenting.

For its first edition, the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans has singled out three different paths to approaching architecture: migration as our sole destination; architecture defined as a permanent ritornello between fiction and reality; dreaming as a method to going beyond catastrophe and towards each other. This triptych is the starting point for our discussions with the invited architects and artists. We have asked each of them to present new works or their latest research, in order to better understand how their respective architectural vision/work address others, by considering dreams as the point of convergence for Utopia, experimentation, prospective and memory. We have seen how the continuous exchanges between all these paradigms give birth to an art of synthesis that the various exhibitions of this Biennale seek to bring to light. Thus, we are exploring a new prospective, a field of experimentation and innovation in order to create an architecture of non-static and non-dominant situations while hopefully escaping «architectural chiourism»1.