Jacques Ferrier

Jacques Ferrier has developed a highly individual approach to architecture, rejecting the strictly formalist approach of the Modernists and instead embracing technology to improve relationship between people and their environment. Central to Ferrier’s work is the idea of the sensual city – a desire that all buildings should respond and contribute to the sensory experiences that make us human. In 2010 Jacques Ferrier and Pauline Marchetti founded Sensual City Studio, a research and creative laboratory dedicated to new proposals for a humanist and pleasurable metropolitan life.

The headquarters of Metropole Rouen-Normandie – currently under construction – embodies most of Ferrier’s work obsessions. Notably an extraordinary double-façade that contributes to a zero-energy building. At the same time it pays a tribute to the impressionism, an avant-garde pictorial movement, part of Rouen’s cultural history. The subtly coloured pattern of the innovative glass panels cladding the building is inspired by one of the numerous paintings done by Claude Monet in Rouen. Here cutting edge technology and poetic emotion are brought together; artificial apparatus produce natural changes playing with natural light, air breath, and climate variations… In the Architektur Galerie Berlin Impressionism shows an optical installation playing with light and colour. The visitor will enjoy a sensitive experience which is an evocation of the one created by the actual building by the Seine in Rouen. Pauline Marchetti is the author of the scenography and did the videos.

Jacques Ferrier founded his Paris based studio in 1993. Among his recent projects: the French Pavilion for the World expo 2010 in Shanghai, the French International School in Beijing (2016), the Airbus Delivery Centre in Toulouse (2006) and the Hachette Livres headquarters in Vanves (2015). Jacques Ferrier and Pauline Marchetti oversaw the architectural coordination of the 68 future Grand Paris Express stations.

In 2016 the comprehensive monograph “The Architecture of Jacques Ferrier” with contributions by Alexander Tzonis and Kenneth Powell is published by Thames & Hudson, London.