Flawed architecture

The theme is not the ruin but the standard and mostly the perfection in architecture. What is incomplete is flawed by definition. However, its imperfection makes it an object of desire inviting who looks at it, to prolong it.

A Cypriot architect designed his house and submitted the building permit in 1992. Then, every summer, he comes to the south of France in the city of Trept to build it by himself, using concrete blocks as its unit. Little by little he moves away from its initial drawing, but then the construction stops and the house is left as it is. 20 years later, his daughter inherits it. The time that passes and alters the building provokes a strange fascination and this unfinished house acquires a narrative potential. The status of the stopped working site changes its initial nature. Suspended between two states of finiteness, the initially transitory state of construction stirs naturally the imagination. The place of movement has become silent, time stretches, making the temporary permanent Inert, the architecture cannot change the rest state it is put in. This fascination for the found object, for these clues, indicating what this house should or could have been, leads us to think that the emotion of this untapped moment can be re-used by confronting it with another nature. The current building is bound by a strong relationship with its landscape, as if it was contemplating it. The geometry of the facade on the street, shaped by the sudden stop of its construction is so particular that it cannot be completed. Instead, a simple volume is drawn at the rear of the building in a deliberately different material to reinforce the break. The moments of unexpected encounter between the existing and the architectural intervention create a new richness. It is imperfect in its most literal definition since the state in which it is unintentionally plunged, does not allow it to correspond to an aesthetic, intellectual or moral ideal. Imperfect, these architectures do not correspond to any standard and yet they tell their story while stimulating new ones and question the value of things.