Breath of an architect

With Bijoy Jain (architect), Taku Satoh (artistic director) and Juliette Lecorne (associate curator).

From December 9, 2023, to April 21, 2024, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents Breath of an Architect, an exhibition specially created by architect Bijoy Jain, founder of Studio Mumbai, in India.

Designed as a space of reverie and contemplation in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s iconic building, the exhibition Breath of an Architect attempts to provide a glimpse, however fleeting that may be, into the sensuality of architecture, the intuitive force that connects us to the elements, and our emotional relationship to space.

To celebrate the opening of this exhibition, the Fondation Cartier invites Bijoy Jain and the Japanese artistic director Taku Satoh to continue a conversation begun for the exhibition catalogue on the theme of creating to the sound of one’s breath, except here, the discussion takes place before a live audience. “Air”, “water”, “empathy”, “horizon”, “light”, and even “reverie” will surely be some of the key words mentioned over the course of the evening. The discussion will be followed by a signing of the exhibition catalogue Breath of an Architect by Bijoy Jain.

“The entire space is designed in relation to the breath—the inspiration and expiration—, but also in relation to the body, the hand, the heart, and the spirit. Or the imagination. Nothing else.”
Bijoy Jain (excerpt from the conversation between Bijoy Jain and Taku Satoh published in the exhibition catalogue).

Biographies

Bijoy Jain, born in 1965 in Mumbai, studied at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He worked in Los Angeles and London before returning to India in 1995 and founding Studio Mumbai. The studio operates as an interdisciplinary group of architects, engineers, master builders, artisans, technicians and artists across continents.As a collective, they are involved in the research and development of projects, using process and time as an integral part of its expression; water air and light being the basis of all materiality in the synthesis of the work... Humankind in nature – nature in Humankind.
Bijoy Jain teaches at the Accademia di architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana in Mendrisio, Switzerland. He also taught as a visiting professor at Yale University in the United States and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium, for his contribution to the architectural profession. In 2017, he received the RIBA International Fellowship in London.

Taku Satoh is a Japanese artistic director. In 1981 he graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts), design department. In 1984, he founded Taku Satoh Design Office (TSDO). He now lives and works in Tokyo. Among his many works, he designed Pleats Please Issey Miyake with Issey Miyake, and created the logos for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. With the designer Naoto Fukasawa, he is one of the Director of the 21 21 Design Sight museum, founded by Issey Miyake in 2007.