Archi & BD - La ville dessinée.

From the beginning of the 20th century, with authors like Winsor McCay (Little Nemo), George McManus (Bringing Up Father), Frank O. King (Gasoline Alley) and Alain Saint-Ogan (Zig et Puce), comics have explored the city, fascinated by the emerging world that they represent.

This theme does not only cover the city itself, but also the elements directly related to it including architecture, urban development, design, history and politics. It became an ideal format for aesthetic descriptions and reflections on the modern world with authors such as François Schuiten, Benoît Peeters, Enki Bilal, and Moebius…

The exhibition will portray representations of the city in comics and does not aim to be exhaustive.

Works will be arranged chronologically from the 1900s to the present day, with special projects presented at the end of the exhibition: the imaginary city of Villemolle by Requins Marteaux, the Hergé museum, the Maison de Verre, an order from Jean Nouvel to comic book authors.

This exhibition includes a total of 150 international authors and 350 works and aims to show how modern comics are pushing the boundaries of creativity, with comic authors closely linked to contemporary art such as Jochen Gerner, Ilan Manouach, Dominique Goblet, Thierry Van Hasselt, and Christopher Hittinger.

Architectural representations and urban fiction .

This exhibition is a dialogue between architecture and comics.
Models, sketches, town plans and creations, public buildings and villas, utopias drawn by the greatest architects reminding us of the familiarity of these imagined realities.

In contrast to the plates of the comic authors where the city is heroine, architectural works reveal how they in turn have been influenced by the 9th art… This section of the exhibition focuses on the way architecture and the city are represented and attempts to explore the closely linked illustrated worlds from the 1910s (Sant’Elia) to the present day (BIG, Herzog & De Meuron…), not forgetting the 1970s (Archigram, Coop Himmelblau and Jean Balladur…).

The many visions of the city reveal a tendency to imagine the future and a desire to explore new ways of life. To London, Vienna, Madrid or Paris; it is an invitation to journey through urban fiction and the most fantastical metropolitan scripts.



Exhibition designed and created by the Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine / Institut Français d’Architecture
Curated by: Jean-Marc Thévenet and Francis Rambert
Scenography: Projectiles


Dates: From 9/Jun until 28/Nov 2010.

Venue: Palais de Chaillot. 1, Place du Trocadéro. Paris, France.