Inspirations

The artist duo Les Simonnet, made up of Pierre and Annie Simmonet, have made their mark on the French art scene with a singular body of work combining sculpture, design and playful art. Their particularity: designing monumental sculptures that take the form of children's games, at the crossroads of art and urban furniture. Working since the 1960's, Les Simonnet were early interested in the relationship between art and everyday life, in particular by integrating the child as a central player in public space. For them, art shouldn't just be contemplative; it can - and must - be manipulated, explored and experienced. Their work is thus distinguished by a strong educational and social dimension, in keeping with their desire to open up art to all.

Their sculptures, often colorful, rounded and modular, are designed to awaken imagination, curiosity and motor skills. Inspired by simple geometric shapes, supple volumes and resistant materials, they designed numerous playful modules installed in schools, nurseries and public squares, notably in France in the 1970's and 1980's. These works transform playgrounds into genuine spaces for artistic experimentation, while respecting children's needs and dreams.

Through their creations, the Simonnet pose an essential question: what if play were a form of artistic expression in its own right? By blurring the boundaries between sculpture and play,

Pierre Cardin left his mark on the history of fashion with a resolutely forward-looking vision. A precursor of futuristic style since the 1960's, he broke with the traditional codes of haute couture with bold geometric shapes, new materials such as vinyl and plastic, and an aesthetic inspired by the conquest of space. His unisex, functional and architectural fashions broke with convention, asserting a creative freedom rare at the time. But Pierre Cardin was also a master of communication. The first couturier to show his designs outside the fashion capitals, from Moscow to Beijing, he was able to export his image internationally long before his contemporaries. He understood the importance of the name as a brand, affixing his signature to a multitude of products, from fashion to furniture to fragrances. An innovative strategy that reinforced the power of his world.

His designs, often avant-garde, embodied a radical, visionary modernity. Today, they remain emblematic of an era when fashion became a language of rupture, innovation and individual expression. Pierre Cardin didn't just dress the times: he was ahead of them.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg is a German photographer born in 1938, known for her conceptual and documentary approach to architecture and landscape. Among her most striking works is her series on brutalist bus shelters in Armenia, produced in the 2000's. This series highlights structures with unusual, sculptural forms, remnants of a Soviet modernism that was both utopian and functional. These shelters, designed between the 1960's and 1980's, demonstrate a surprising formal freedom for public buildings. In photographing them, Schulz-Dornburg doesn't just record an architectural reality; she reveals a vanishing world, imbued with strangeness and poetry. Isolated in arid landscapes or by the roadside, these micro-architectures become silent symbols of a bygone past, of a collapsed ideology.

His work, always sober and precise, captures the tension between permanence and abandonment, between utopia and ruin, while casting a critical eye on the memory of places. The bus shelter series is thus part of a broader reflection on time, space and oblivion.

The Farnsworth House, designed between 1945 and 1951 by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is one of the masterpieces of the modern movement. Located in Plano, Illinois (USA), the house embodies Mies' minimalist ideal, summed up by his famous maxim: “Less is more”. Commissioned by Dr. Edith Farnsworth, the house was conceived as a weekend residence. It is in profound dialogue with its natural surroundings. Raised above the ground to escape the Fox River's frequent flooding, the structure rests on eight steel pillars, allowing the house to “float” above the ground. The architecture is distinguished by its radical simplicity: an open plan, white-painted steel structure, large bay windows on all sides, and a single interior volume. This total transparency creates continuity between inside and outside, abolishing the boundary between man and nature. Farnsworth House is a masterly illustration of modernist architectural language: structural rationality, formal simplicity, honesty of materials. Yet behind its geometric purity, the house has also given rise to controversy, not least as regards its habitability. Exposed to view, weather and flood, it raises questions about comfort and privacy in such radical architecture.

Today, Farnsworth House is a listed historic monument and a place of pilgrimage for architecture enthusiasts.

For Donald Judd, the emblematic figure of Minimalism, the home is not simply a place to live, but a direct extension of thought. In his writings, as in his projects in Marfa, Texas, he conceives of space as a coherent whole, where each element - furniture, light, volume - must respond to a clear need, without ornament or superfluity. The home thus becomes a silent manifesto: a place where form follows function, where harmony is born of precision.

His philosophy is based on simplicity, not as an impoverishment, but as a refinement. To eliminate the decorative is to rediscover the essential. Judd's simplicity is never empty: it's full of meaning, attention and precision. In his spaces, dwelling becomes an act of conscious presence - a way of inhabiting the world with lucidity and rigor.

German photographers Bernd & Hilla Becher devoted their work to industrial architecture, particularly water towers. Their approach, both artistic and documentary, is based on methodological rigor. They photograph these structures head-on, under neutral light, eliminating all subjectivity and concentrating on form. Their aim is not to produce isolated images, but comparative series, or “typologies”, that reveal the differences and similarities between objects of similar function. Each series becomes a silent tableau of industrial architecture, where repetition and variation construct a visual language. Through this systematic approach, the Becher transform utilitarian elements into veritable anonymous sculptures, inscribing their work in conceptual art while retaining a documentary value.

Superstudio is a collective of Italian architects founded in 1966 in Florence by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. Emerging from the Italian radical movement, the group challenges traditional architecture by denouncing its role in consumption and unrestrained urbanization. Rather than constructing buildings, they produced conceptual projects, collages, and films that imagined futuristic and often dystopian landscapes.

The Continuous Monument represents a huge geometric grid covering the planet, symbolizing a total and absurd architecture. Through these critical visions, Superstudio seeks less to propose solutions than to provoke reflection: what if true architecture were that of ideas rather than objects?

The private residence that Oscar Niemeyer created for himself is The House the Canoes (Casa das Canoas), which would later become the headquarters of the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation. The Casa das Canoas in Rio de Janeiro was designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1951. It was used as his family house until 1965, the year in which he had to abandon Brazil due to the military dictatorship. Using tropical eroticism as a construction language Niemeyer deconstructed the language of functionalist modern architecture: the curved flat roof supported by light steel columns and the transparent glass walls make the house disappear within the tropical jungle.

Guy Bourdin, a major figure in 20th-century fashion photography, revolutionized the codes of advertising imagery. Provocative and visionary, he refused to simply showcase the product: for him, the accessory was merely a pretext for telling a story. His compositions, often tinged with eroticism and mystery, blend beauty and unease, seduction and discomfort. Each image is conceived as a standalone work, where the staging rivals that of painting and cinema.

By diverting advertising from its primary function, Bourdin turned commercial photography into a veritable field of artistic experimentation. His campaigns for Charles Jourdan and Vogue do not merely sell shoes or clothing: they captivate, disturb, and fascinate. Thanks to his keen sense of visual storytelling, he established the idea that advertising photography can transcend marketing and become art in its own right.

Barbara Hepworth occupies an essential place in modern British and international sculpture. Trained in direct carving, she worked with stone and wood with a deep respect for the material, seeking to reveal its natural qualities rather than constrain them. Her works are distinguished by their organic, refined forms, which evoke the human body, landscapes and natural rhythms. One of her most characteristic techniques is the piercing of her volumes: these circular or oval openings transform the void into an active sculptural element, where light, air and the gaze become part of the work. Based in St Ives, Cornwall, Hepworth was inspired by the intimate relationship between sculpture and the environment. Her monumental bronze and stone pieces interact with the landscape, the sea and the sky, reflecting a search for balance between the weight of the material and the fluidity of the forms. Beyond their abstraction, her sculptures express a spiritual quest: they connect man, nature and the universe. Through their simplicity and poetic power, they invite a sensory and meditative experience.

Thus, Barbara Hepworth's work combines modernity and timelessness: it embodies a sculpture in which fullness and emptiness, mass and light harmonise to create forms that transcend the object and become an experience of space.

The Brion Tomb, also known as the Brion Cemetery, is a funerary monument located in San Vito d'Altivole, Italy. Designed by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa between 1968 and 1978, the site is dedicated to the memory of the Brion family. More than just a cemetery, it is a poetic and symbolic space that harmoniously combines architecture, nature and emotion. Scarpa creates a genuine dialogue between natural and architectural elements. Water, omnipresent in the form of pools, canals and mirrors, adds a meditative and reflective dimension, inviting visitors to contemplate. The materials chosen - concrete, wood, stone and metal - are finely crafted, testifying to the attention to detail characteristic of Scarpa's style. The architecture of the Tombeau Brion blends modernity and tradition. The work is inspired by Japanese gardens and ancient mausoleums, while adopting a unique contemporary language. The geometric shapes, the play of light and shadow, and the pathway between the various spaces create a veritable initiatory journey. Each element is charged with symbolism, evoking life, death, memory and the passage of time.

The Brion Tomb is recognized as a major work of twentieth-century funerary architecture. It perfectly illustrates Carlo Scarpa's ability to transform a place of contemplation into a sensitive, poetic experience.

Ettore Sottsass was one of the most visionary and radical figures in 20th-century design. An architect, designer and thinker, he never accepted the reduction of design to a mere utilitarian function or an exercise in style at the service of industry. For him, objects were not just things to be used, but mediators of life, fragments of poetry capable of transforming everyday experience. His radicalism was first expressed in his rejection of modernist dogmas. At a time when design was supposed to be rational, sober and universal, Sottsass introduced colour, emotion and deliberate imperfection. He dared to break with the prevailing ‘good taste’ by inventing a formal language nourished by popular culture, archaic references, Eastern spirituality and a playful energy. His genius lay in understanding that objects could convey narratives, ambiguities and contradictions, and that it was in this tension that their power lay.

The Memphis movement, which he founded in 1981, symbolises this radical attitude: chromatic explosion, offbeat geometries, unexpected combinations of materials. But beyond aesthetics, Memphis expresses a political and social critique: rejecting homogeneity, introducing difference, cultivating strangeness in a world that tends towards standardisation. Sottsass advocates design that provokes, disturbs and emancipates, rather than reassures. His genius lies not only in form, but also in thought. He was radical in his insistence on reducing design to its essence: the relationship between human beings and the objects that surround them, not as tools, but as companions in life. In doing so, Ettore Sottsass broke new ground: he reminded us that creating also means questioning, disrupting and offering new ways of seeing the world.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes series embodies a quest for visual purity and temporal meditation. Each photograph is composed of two fundamental elements - sea and sky - separated by a rigorously straight horizon line. This extreme, almost austere formal simplicity reveals a profound rigor in composition and technique: long exposure times, perfectly symmetrical framing, absence of any narrative or distracting elements.

Here, Sugimoto captures the timeless, as if these seascapes - frozen in their eternal calm - were the same ones that early man might have contemplated. In this series, photography becomes an exercise in simplicity and contemplation, where each image seems suspended outside time. Through the repetition of the motif and the constancy of the gaze, Sugimoto proposes a visual meditation on permanence, memory and perception.

Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese-American sculptor with a cosmopolitan background, has developed an intimate relationship with materials, particularly stone. This deep connection was revealed in a singular way in the village of Mure, located on the Japanese island of Shikoku. Mure, famous for the light-gray granite quarried from the region's mountains, became an essential, almost spiritual, place of creation for Noguchi. He discovered Mure in the 1960's, and gradually established an open-air studio at the foot of Mount Ojigatake. Fascinated by the density, texture and nobility of the local stone, Noguchi surrounded himself with stone-cutting craftsmen, whose ancestral know-how nourished his own sculptural language. For him, it's not a question of dominating the material, but rather of collaborating with it, revealing its inner form, as if each block of granite held a secret to be revealed. At Mure, Noguchi's practice takes on a more meditative and monumental tone. Here, he sculpts works in which the balance between form and matter, between fullness and emptiness, expresses a profound quest for harmony. His approach remains faithful to Zen philosophy, influenced by nature and time: stone, marked by the centuries, becomes a living medium, transformed without ever being betrayed.

This workplace would later become the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum Japan, a preserved space where his sculptures interact with natural elements - trees, rocks, light - in a subtle balance between architecture and landscape. Mure is not just a production site: it is a place of contemplation, where the slow pace of stonework echoes a reflection on permanence, memory, and the silent beauty of forms.