In early 2020, the Covid epidemic suddenly freezes humanity and empties cities. In Île-de-France, more than one million people choose to leave the metropolis to protect themselves. The immediate consequence of the health crisis, the urban exodus recalls the fragile links between city and health, between architecture and prophylaxis, between city and hospitality. It also opens a field of questions for the city of tomorrow: access to places of care and place of medicine; evolution of health facilities and management of all pathologies; aging of the population and accessibility of equipment or housing; urban mortality and burial place; health impacts of our metropolitan metabolisms and transformation of territories...
Under the co-direction of philosopher Cynthia Fleury and the SCAU architects' collective, the “Sustaining” event questions the history of care, “the places and architectures that hold us and support us, rather than holding us or containing us.” The Hôtel-Dieu, the foundation and promise of the city, opens the work and the exhibition. A series of portraits of inhabited and uninhabited places and territories follow, reread through the prism of “care”, health and solicitude through various medical, urban, philosophical, artistic disciplines… These reconciliations then draw an unprecedented cartography analyzed through founding acts or emblematic architectures.
This hybrid corpus brings together in the exhibition plans, models, photographs, videos, original drawings, works, installations... organized around seven themes without established order. It is a question of distances, between health and disease, and between the city and its places of care; of elements, that is to say, non-architectural territories that are caretakers or non carers; of forms, namely those that the hospital takes and, more generally, the institution of care; borders, those that draw the limits of gestures and places of care, from the most intimate to the most public; necropolis, to speak of the care we take to the dead; heterotopias, these alternative architectures in which, and through which other forms of care are invented; uninhabitable, that is to say, of these sick territories in which the architect must repair the world.”