New Architectures

In bringing together architectural proposals for new buildings for six regional contemporary art funds (FRAC), this exhibition is to make visitors aware of the diversity of contemporary architectural debate. To signal the unique nature of the FRACs as institutions, is also to identify the positions – each doctrine unique – that describe the challenges of today. Exhibiting these buildings is to appreciate their creativity in form and material and to retrace the phases of design from the initial sketches to the period of construction; to hear what the architects say, similarly what future users have to say; to be projected into the “making” of contemporary architecture.

The FRACs were created in 1982 by the Ministry of Culture and Communication in partnership with the Regional Councils. Their foundation is evidence of an institutional creativity and the wish to democratise and decentralise contemporary art. Thirty years after their creation, they define themselves by the multiple relationships they have established in order to make art more accessible to different audiences: between artists, art lovers, schoolchildren and students, teachers and researchers, these institutions define a territory, that of contemporary artistic creation and its dissemination. Moreover, when a FRAC becomes a place, the original and utopian cultural challenges generate experimental architectural projects. How to embody in the city of the institutions that develop collections of contemporary art, conserve them, pass them on, export them, make them the foundation of exhibition programmes, support for the creative arts, raising awareness, education, in short, what architectural designs suit constantly changing collections? These are the challenges of the six distinctive architectural competitions which distinguish the current state of architecture in France in these last few years.

Six regions, Aquitaine, Britanny, the Centre region, Franche-Comté, Nord-Pas de Calais and Provence-Alpes- Côte d’Azur are committed, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication and other local communities, to a project for a FRAC described as “new generation”.

Contemporaneous with major decentralised artistic construction projects that include the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Louvre Lens to name but two, the projects for the six new FRACs are the products of an architectural competition whose winners are established international names. Moreover, you will find in Bordeaux the Danish team BIG in association with FREAKS, in Rennes, the Odile Decq and Benoît Cornette agency, in Besançon and Marseille the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, in Dunkirk Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal and in Orleans the Jakob + MacFarlane team. Although most of these buildings are still under construction, the Centre Pompidou opens the doors to these manifest construction sites.