Double Jeu / Odile Decq

I have always considered that architectural work was not limited to the building envelope and its spatial organization, but that, like the architects of the early 20th century, it extended into the interior design, the furniture and sometimes the artwork.

Since the opening of my architectural studio in the early 1980s, I have often tried to install furniture elements in my buildings. I have succeeded very occasionally. In the 1980s and 1990s, the clients I had were not inclined to do so. However, I did make ten "Javelin" lamps for a room in the BPO building in 1990. These lamps became the prototypes of the "Javelin" lamp later developed for MACRO in Rome with Luceplan in the early 2000s. When the BPO was sold and emptied of its contents, including furniture, I bought them all back.

Then, it was the opportunity of a competition for the replacement of telephone booths for the Unesco headquarters in Paris, won in 2000, that allowed me to start my design work on a larger scale. In the hall where these booths were installed, I was asked to choose some furniture and I decided to design them and have them made. For the reception counter for the delegations, I designed an 11-meter long object, then the armchairs, tables, wastepaper baskets and ashtrays. I had been attending the Salon du Meuble in Paris for a long time and I consulted the companies exhibited there with my furniture file; this is how I started working with Domeau & Pérès who were willing to embark on the adventure with me.

At the MACRO in Rome, it was suggested to me to continue the work of the building by the furniture. I went to the Milan Furniture Fair and met Luceplan with my drawings for the "Javelot" lamp. Luceplan then recommended Poltrona Frau to make my chairs and, one thing leading to another, I made all the furniture for the museum as well as the signage. For the Italians, it seemed obvious to ask the architect to do it there, where since the 1960s, all the great Italian designers were architects.

For the Frac Bretagne, it was a little more complicated to do it because of the splitting of public contracts in France; the person who makes the building is not the one who makes the furniture, or even the graphics of the signage. But I managed, despite everything, to design some pieces.

The project I went the furthest with was the Antares tower that I just finished in Barcelona. I designed everything: the furniture, the lamps in the public areas, the bathtubs, the sinks, the kitchens, the swimming pools, the sports areas, the tables and chairs in the restaurant, the signage and the garden. 

The garden interests me more and more. The search for the right species to plant fascinates me as much as the consideration of the growing season.

Since childhood, art has been important to me, I studied it in middle school thanks to an incredible drawing teacher who helped me to paint.

I began studying art history before enrolling in architecture school. I watched, followed, visited, explored the salons and fairs in Paris. I gave up painting after I began my architectural studies because I didn't find the time to pursue it and I wasn't sure of my abilities in this field that fascinated and intimidated me at the same time.

The galleries Polaris in Paris and Oniris in Rennes encouraged me to reinvest in this field and I took the plunge a first time in 2007 in Paris. In 2004, the Artist Space gallery in New York had already entrusted me with a space and asked me for an installation "without doing architecture". I then drew on my conceptual preoccupations to propose a constructed virtual space destabilizing the visitor's body, "Sensual HyoerTension". I remembered, at that time, the installation made at the Magasin in Grenoble in 1993, "HyperTension", more spatial but also seeking to blur the tracks of the apprehension and perception of space. At the Chaumont Festival in 2000, "Memories of Highland Lights" was also an installation rather than a garden, as was "Black Hole" in 2009. 

Much earlier, the improbable models, more works of art hung on the walls of the studio of the rue Saint-Honoré in 1989, than architectural models of which they represented only the concepts or the lines of force of the projects.

I could still evoke more moments in my history during which art and architecture were intertwined without really knowing which was the first or which was the driving force.

I have always said that there is an artistic component to architecture, and in my work, this component has become more and more important, sometimes even becoming the work itself.

Thus, the works presented at the 8+4 gallery have certainly come from architectural works, but weren't they there before, at the stage of the conception of the project when decisions were made about architectural compositions at different scales? I would not know how to answer this question today and probably less and less.

That is why I do not think it is necessary to know which building it is...

Odile Decq

October 2021