The current decompartmentalization of artistic disciplines brings about the emergence of new proposals. Architect Jean Verville demonstrates this hybridization in architectural interventions swapping the user’s experience into a spatial and pictorial experimentation, in which sensory perception is asked to transgress the physical limits of space to favor the illusory abstraction of dimensional form and produce architecture that seems free from their function and materiality. In 2017, architect Jean Verville realized IN 1 2 3, three installations combining art, architecture and domesticity. These intimate portraits present universes transposing the personalities of their occupants, while illustrating their moving collaborations with the designer. The architect infiltrates his installations with intriguing photographic proposals in which the presence of an allegorical figure proposes a new modality of appreciation for architecture.

IN 2

The IN 2 project presents a domestic architectural installation designed for two lovers of contemporary arts, theater, music and dance, as well as digital art, video and installation. By integrating an inventive experimentation in a Montreal cottage of the 50s, architect Jean Verville exalts fusion of art and everyday life in a proposal requiring a high degree of user participation. The architectural intervention blurs the reading of spaces with volumetric assemblages and visual breakthroughs, contrasts and tensions, scale games and trompe-l’oeil. The opposition between black and white produces optical effects oscillating between reality and abstraction, where bidimensionality borders on three-dimensionality until the boundaries between the two notions disappear. By addressing the pleasure conveyed by architecture, Verville offers a daily participatory experience to the occupants of this graphic environment. This architectural journey, animated by whimsical touches that unload the intervention of the coldness and seriousness often associated with contemporary architecture, calls for an experience completely altered by illusion, and this, for the delight of its owners.

The architect

Winner of numerous prizes, and enjoying significant international diffusion, architect Jean Verville presents a diversified production of architecture, installation and scenography. The architect’s interest lies in the possibilities of hybridization between arts and architecture and their impact on the architectural creation process. A series of research stays in Japan, focusing on “Art House Projects”, led him to a reflection on the artistic experience within architecture, which he pursued as part of his PhD in Arts Studies and Practice, at University of Quebec in Montreal. In 2016, Verville joined university teaching in addition to his architectural practice and researches.

1100 p² / 100 m²

Wood, lacquer, paint, granite,

ceramic tile, mirror

Collaborators:                         

François Bodlet

Stéphane Gimbert

Steve Tousignant

Photos: Maxime Brouillet