ARCHI & BD - La Ville Dessinee

The "ARCHI & BD" (architecture and comics) exhibition will be held at the Cité de l'Architecture & du Patrimoine until 28 November 2010. It presents the relationships between comics and architecture.

From the beginning of the 20th century, comics' authors like Winsor McCay (Little Nemo), George McManus (Bringing Up Father), Frank O. King (Gasoline Alley) and Alain Saint-Ogan (Zig et Puce), have explored the city, fascinated by the emerging world that they represent.

This theme does not only cover the city itself, but also the elements directly related to it including architecture, urban development, design, history and politics. Authors such as François Schuiten, Benoît Peeters, Enki Bilal, and Moebius describe the modern world through comics and provide a field of reflections.

Works are arranged chronologically from the 1900s to the present day and the projects the imaginary city of Villemolle by Requins Marteaux, the Hergé museum, the Maison de Verre, an order from Jean Nouvel to comic book authors are presented at the end of the exhibition.

This chronological display includes references to different cities. New-York, Paris and Tokyo are observed through the prism of authors like Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, David Mazzuchelli and Riad Sattouf for New York; Blutch, Tardi and Dupuy-Berberian for Paris; Jiro Taniguchi, Osamu Tezuka, Toiyo Matsumoto and Maoki Urasawa for Tokyo.

The exhibition also investigates the close relationship and affinities between authors of different generations, like the ligne claire of the end of the 1970s (Joost Swarte, Ted Benoit, Floc'h...) which draws inspiration from the Belgian comic book masters of the 1950s and 1960s: André Franquin, Maurice Tilleux, Will...

The "ARCHI & BD" exhibition portrays a vision of the artistic and cultural depth of comics to the general public through a century of creation.

This exhibition includes a total of 150 international authors and 350 works and aims to show how modern comics are pushing the boundaries of creativity, with comic authors closely linked to contemporary art such as Jochen Gerner, Ilan Manouach, Dominique Goblet, Thierry Van Hasselt, and Christopher Hittinger.

This exhibition is a dialogue between architecture and comics. Architectural representations and urban fiction are presented in a special area.

Models, sketches, town plans and creations, public buildings and villas, utopias drawn by the greatest architects reminding us of the familiarity of these imagined realities.

In contrast to the plates of the comic authors where the city is heroine, architectural works reveal how they in turn have been influenced by the 9th art. This section of the exhibition focuses on the way architecture and the city are represented and attempts to explore the closely linked illustrated worlds from the 1910s (Sant'Elia) to the present day (BIG, Herzog & De Meuron and André Jaque...), not forgetting the 1970s (Archigram, Coop Himmelblau and Jean Balladur...).

The many visions of the city reveal a tendency to imagine the future and a desire to explore new ways of life. To London, Vienna, Madrid or Paris; it is an invitation to journey through urban fiction and the most fantastical metropolitan scripts.

Exhibition designed and created by the Cité de l'Architecture & du Patrimoine / Institut Français d'Architecture
Curated by: Jean-Marc Thévenet (director of the Angoulême International Comics Festival from 1998 to 2006) and Francis Rambert (director of the Institut Français d'Architecture)
Scenography: Projectiles

Further information available at: http://www.citechaillot.fr/exposition/temporary_exhibitions.php?id=139
Photograph: Cité de l'Architecture & du Patrimoine / Institut Français d'Architecture