Attempting to pin down Jean-Yves Barrier and classify his work is
a tricky, and perhaps not altogether useful, business, for his whole
career has been conducted outside of established doctrines and
architectural fashions. Painting and theatre were his first loves, and
although he long flirted with architecture and urbanism, his finally
going professional happened almost by accident. The unanticipated
success of his first two buildings launched a career that has since
proved rich and prolific. The types of project he has undertaken in
his quarter century of activity are extremely varied, including individual
houses, apartment buildings, schools, libraries, university buildings,
museums, town halls, offices, public spaces and thoroughfares,
and even civil-engineering infrastructure. Barrier is a great
pragmatist, always interested in the specificities of each project and
never in the application of »universal«, readymade solutions. Indeed
a horror of serial-line architecture and doctrinaire approaches characterizes his oeuvre, and helps explain its great variety, as well as the lack of family resemblance among his realizations. Nonetheless, an elegance of style and spareness of vocabulary are always present -
although something of a maverick, Barrier does not operate in a vacuum,
and a certain rather French design sensibility infuses his work.
Barrier's career has been marked by an interest in environmentally
friendly building and by experimentation in »passive«, energy-saving
design. Urbanism has also figured prominently in his work, in keeping
with a design approach where context, along with use, are the
principal starting points. Here again, however, Barrier is not prescriptive, and it is the wider context in which he is working that informs his vision. Since his urban interventions to date have been in towns and villages in western and northwestern France, it is essentially
from a European, 19th-century urbanistic tradition that he has drawn
inspiration. In the town centre of St-Pierre-des-Corps, his realizations
repaired and reconsolidated a fabric fractured by World War II bombings and insensitive post-war redevelopment; at the riverside Deux-Lions development in Tours, he combined the internal layout of the city's typical 19th-century housing with massing and detailing evocative of a fishing village; at the Brandons estate in Normandy, his interventions were inspired by the site's garden-city past.
Although the results differ markedly each time, Barrier's working
method is the same for every project: a thorough exploration of the
many possibilities nourished by an ongoing dialogue with all the different participants, from the client to the suppliers to the construction professionals. It is this insistence on the architect's role as the keystone of the whole building process that allows his tailor-made designs to be translated faithfully into built form.
Andrew Ayers studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture and
Planning, University College London, and now lives in Paris. See
also: Andrew Ayers, The Architecture of Paris.
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