L’art du chantier. Construire et démolir du XVIe au XXIe siècle
The world is full of books on architecture, contemporary and historic, staging its masterpieces in full-bleed photographs, laying out their technical details and aesthetic virtues in the text. L’Art du Chantier is different. It is dedicated to the step before, to the construction site, the void-to-be-filled, and in case there is no void, to the site that needs to be demolished before something new can take its place.
This book presents the catalog to the eponymous exhibition at Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, in fall/winter 2018/19. It was designed by Jeanne Triboul in collaboration with Studio Doc Levin, located roughly 5.5 km southeast of the Cité, and realized by the institute in partnership with Belgian publishing house Snoeck, located in Ghent.
The design of the book is based on Jean-Baptiste Levée’s Minotaur Sans by Production Type, predominantly the regular and the bold cuts. Named after the mythical creature that is a recurring motif in the œuvre of Pablo Picasso, it is the designer’s take on Cubism in type design.
In a manner still unconventional for France and read as modernist, the book designer chose to set the title on the cover all-lowercase, a choice reflected as well in the separating titles identifying the main parts of the book and in the running titles in the head of the pages.
Most texts for continuous reading are set fully justified. Diversion is achieved through playing in the grid with the width of one or two columns. Captions and lead-ins are set with ragged right alignment. The overall layout is airy and leaves generous margins. Small indents of marginal notes make the spreads all the more appealing.
