paul cournet's photostream

Voyage d'Hermes advertisement, with Air France aircrafts.

Collage
Air France magazine.

paper and glue
42x30

2012

Metabolism book launch at Barbican centre, London.

Project Japan discussion between curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, architect Rem Koolhaas and graphic designer Irma Boom.
Discussion introduced by critic Shumon Basar.

More on the Project Japan book here:
www.oma.eu/publications/project-japan-metabolism-talks
Get the book here:
www.amazon.com/Project-Japan-Metabolism-Rem-Koolhaas/dp/3...

More on OMA-Progress exhibition @ Barbican artgallery here:
www.deconcrete.org/2011/10/05/omaamo-the-spectacle-of-fai...

2011

Detroit, Michigan

Heidelberg project on Heidelberg street.

Videos on Gratiot avenue from downtown Detroit to 8 mile, shot on the same day :
vimeo.com/32564998
vimeo.com/33174891

2011

Two paintings strikingly similar,

One from the 18th century by Piranesi showing Roma with chaotic architecture and the second one, by Thomas Cole in the 19th century showing paradoxically a composition of the architect's dream.

A_Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Antichita Romana
1756 Frontispiece II- Antichita Romane III

B_Thomas Cole - The Architect's Dream
1840, Oil on canvas. 53 x 84 1/16 in. Toledo Museum of Art. Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A Scott, 1949.162.

Giovanni Battista (also Giambattista) Piranesi (4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778) was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" (Carceri d'Invenzione).
The remains of Rome kindled Piranesi's enthusiasm. He was able to faithfully imitate the actual remains of a fabric; his invention in catching the design of the original architect provided the missing parts; his masterful skill at engraving introduced groups of vases, altars, tombs that were absent in reality; and his broad and scientific distribution of light and shade completed the picture, creating a striking effect from the whole view. Some of his later work was completed by his children and several pupils.
Piranesi's son and coadjutor, Francesco, collected and preserved his plates, in which the freer lines of the etching-needle largely supplemented the severity of burin work. Twenty nine folio volumes containing about 2000 prints appeared in Paris (1835 - 1837).
The late Baroque works of Claude Lorrain, Salvatore Rosa, and others had featured romantic and fantastic depictions of ruins; in part as a memento mori or as a reminiscence of a golden age of construction. Piranesi's reproductions of real and recreated Roman ruins were a strong influence on Neoclassicism.

Thomas Cole created The Architect's Dream for prominent New York architect Ithiel Town, who commissioned a landscape from the artist in 1839. Town paid Cole in cash and books from his extensive architectural library, which inspired the painting's fantastic composition. Cole was, in his own words, "something of an architect," and provided the plans for the Ohio State Capitol, and also for St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Catskill after an earlier building burned down in 1839. Cole's friend William Cullen Bryant described The Architect's Dream as "an assemblage of structures, Egyptian, Gothic, Grecian, Moorish, such as might present itself to the imagination of one who had fallen asleep after reading a work on the different styles of architecture." Cole finished The Architect's Dream in only five weeks, exhibiting it in the 1840 National Academy of Design annual exhibition, where it received mixed reviews. Some critics found it "too full of poetry," while others declared it "display[ed] as much genius as many of his best." Unfortunately, Cole's patron was on the opposing side, and ultimately refused to accept the painting because it was "exclusively Architectural."

Paris 10°

2010