LES CARRIÈRES
photo by Jacqueline Lin
I am fascinated by the architecture of the “Carrières”, the subterranean quarries carved into the limestone cliffs of Provence: their massive scale, the poetry of their rudimentary forms, the rhythmic play of light and shadow, and above all, the spaces, immense and continuous which inspire the imagination and invite exploration. It is an extraordinary, but also an incidental architecture, as it does not begin with an intentional design, and does not have its own creation as a goal, but rather is the fortuitous consequence of a human activity. Its only purpose: the extraction of material. Its only constraint: to hold up the mountain. And how will this extracted material, this limestone, be used? To create architecture.
I find this a seductive duality: that in the process of producing the raw material for a purposeful architecture of construction, another architecture is created: the incidental architecture of extraction.