English

"Architecture is both the whole and the part of the city" [1]

Patrick Berger architect, born in Paris in 1947, has been involved in the renewal of French architecture since the 1980s, particularly through his approach combining Architecture, City, History and Nature.
After beginning his architecture studies in 1966 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts in Paris, he went to Nepal to study ethno-architecture in Panauti, a royal city in the Himalayas. The themes addressed during this trip were those that he continued to research over the years : Humanity’s forms of living as demarcated and represented by architecture ; building processes and their expression ; people’s own beliefs and their built signs making up the City ; the history of Humanity’s natural and built environments and the questions raised by their evolution today.

Patrick Berger’s books Formes cachées, la ville ; Milieux ; and Animal ? describe the concepts he explored at different level in his professional practice. [2] [3]

What is specific about Berger’s work is an inquiry that resolves the dilemma between the architectural expression of use and character of a site. His architecture gives unity to a symbolic expression of use and offers an orientation to the future of a site : its perception, organization and public space. To this end, his drawings fashion – for each shape and material used – the various elements, their assemblies, and their composition and proportions.

Patrick Berger is Honorary Professor of Architecture at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and has also taught in Saint-Etienne and Paris. He is the author of in-situ installations, sometimes ephemeral or even almost performative. Berger’s drawings and models are part of the collections of the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, the Institut français d’architecture (IFA), and the German Museum of Architecture (DAM).