From 4 July to 21 September 2024, the luca will be hosting a solo exhibition by French architect Jean-Christophe Quinton entitled “The otherness of the rooms and the promise of the forms”.

         —     Exhibition

Each plan is the fruit of a strategy that seeks to create high-quality relationships between the different parts that make it up. The project is born of this rapprochement between the component, seen as an irreducible primary entity, and the plan, conceived with the desire to guarantee the quality of their association.

This exhibition is an opportunity to share twenty years of architectural practice through a project culture driven by the notion of the piece. With drawing as a resource for seeing, designing and showing, models of all scales for a sensitive immersion and the book for a different temporality, the visitor is invited to explore the multiplicity of emotions aroused by the architectural experience and to share the pleasure of looking at the world of the project through that of the rooms.

This exhibition is organised by the luca – Luxembourg centre for architecture, with the support of Institut français du Luxembourg and the Association Victor Hugo.

         —     Jean-Christophe Quinton

Jean-Christophe Quinton, born in 1972, graduated from Ecole Paris-Belleville in 2000. He set up his own practice in 2003. In 2004, he won the Nouveaux Albums des Jeunes Architectes prize, and was mentioned in the Chernikov Prize in 2010. He also teaches at various schools of architecture, and since 2015 has been head of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles. The monograph of his work Vers l’immédiate étrangeté des formes was awarded the Grand prix du livre d’architecture de la Ville de Briey in 2017. He has been a full member of the Académie d’Architecture since 2019.

      In partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, we offer you a writing master class in French with Luxembourg writer Jean Portante on the theme of time.

         —     About the master class

In principle, every writer and poet is self-taught. This does not mean that writing a poem, like anything else, cannot be learned. It has its techniques which, while never replacing the desire or the need to express oneself, or the imagination, or a possible gift, enable you to enter into the depths of words and the hidden links between them.

The aim of this master class is to create the conditions for the unexpected to emerge in writing. To get inside words to make them say what they don’t want to say. To create an intimate dictionary, specific to each individual, enabling original weavings that will lead to the poetic text. Let’s not forget, by the way, that text and weave mean exactly the same thing, if we go back to the Latin source. Text is a fabric of words.

To weave, you need several threads which, when intertwined, create the fabric/text. This is where the writing techniques drawn from the baggage of the European and global avant-gardes come into play, as the dawn of the twentieth century saw writing make leaps and bounds. The master class will draw on the contributions of Lautréamont, the Dadaism of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball, the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp, the Futurism of Marinetti, the Surrealism of Breton and Dalí, the experiments of Kurt Schwitters and John Cage, and the Oulipians who, with Queneau and Pérec, opened up literature to mathematics and its constraints, to playful writing and its astonishing possibilities.

Each participant will be asked to write a number of poems that could be used in a performance-reading, and collected together to ensure that no trace of the experience is lost.

This master class can accommodate a maximum of 15 people. You will receive a confirmation email once your registration has been processed.

         —     About Jean Portante

Jean Portante is a writer, translator, editor, journalist and teacher at the Centre de Langues (now the Institut National des Langues).

Jean Portante was born in Differdange in 1950 to Italian parents. He has lived in Paris since 1983. His work, comprising some forty books – poetry, novels, essays and plays – is widely translated. In France, he is a member of the Académie Mallarmé; in Luxembourg, he is a member of the Institut Grand-Ducal. In 2003, he was awarded the Prix Mallarmé in France for his book L’Étrange langue. In 2011, he was awarded the Prix Batty Weber in Luxembourg for his body of work. His books are published mainly by Castor Astral (France) and Phi (Luxembourg), but also in some twenty other countries. He has been working as a literary translator for over thirty years.