Architecture as Environment. Parc Architects
Paris is Transforming
This slender, large-format book with a blue hardcover from Parc architectes (Paris) draws the reader into an attractive flow of image and text that presents the firm’s buildings and projects in the broader contexts of cosmology and the environment. It begins on the beige endpaper with an introductory text in a large typeface that looks as if it has been designed for a pocket book. The 80 pages that follow are neatly structured into chapters that lead thematically downwards from the cosmos via the atmosphere to the Earth’s inhabitants and thence to the ground. Within the chapters, however, things become a little less clear-cut, with images of various kinds and blocks of text in differing sizes combined freely within a grid on each double page. The effect is less of a book intended to be read in linear fashion than of a website from which the reader can pick and choose elements to view and read. Everything is energised yet subtle in many details. The commitment and enjoyment of everyone involved is tangible. This is one of several unusual architecture publications in this year’s competition, and a testimony to the current transformative mood in French graphic design.
