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Alain Combier
ALAIN COMBIER: ARCHITECTURES
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
(Lower image: La Funiculaire, 1985)
(read on under drawing board)
Suffice to say, he's right - reflections are the bane of exhibitions, especially for photography - but everything else he says is fascinating! (I am assuming, in 2025, your electronic device can translate for you, if needed)
It is worth noting that though his formal education went elsewhere he had always wanted to do fine arts and so in that area he is entirely self taught.
As soon as I saw he liked Tuscan columns that was enough for me. So do I. More seriously, if you are doing landscape architecture you have a fair chance of getting your conceptions realised. If you are doing architecture or naval architecture, somewhat less and if you are a grand conceptualiser in drawings, like Ledoux or Piranesi, virtually none but your influence can stretch through the centuries.
If you are a politician you may have pharonic ambitions to have something named after you, like the Pompidou centre, (though every other academic lawyer I have met in Cambridge has claimed responsibility for having brought about the building of the law faculty) but may not be skillful enough to get your name attached - Ken Livingstone did more to bring about the 2012 Olympics in London but Boris got most of the credit. Who will ever end up with his name on HS2? Nigel Farage? It won't be Brexit he will be remembered for but exit at Old Oak Common.
Returning to the higher achieving M. Combier, the grand conceptual drawings he has been doing for 40 years alongside his professional work are in the Piranesi mould. He is influenced by Ledoux's Ville Ronde, which he imagines (the drawing where the sailing ships cannot escape), and the library is an imaginary building in that town.
This kind of drawing is rare in today's world but anchors us properly in our heritage - his father did archaeological work on which he also drew - in a time when AI threatens to create anything, though lacking in any anchors so that it might as well be on Mars, for that is where the tech lords want to go. His is a pretty kind of joyful drawing.
Especially so as he seems to have done them for no monetary reason, an ocean away from neoliberal values that seeks to assign a numerical quantity to everything which, in the next phase, reductio ad absurdum, tech will reduce to a binary code.
Ville Ronde
The Library
The Library - light study, 1991
The Library - perspective study, 1991
Engraving of the tower of Babel or the tower of 170 metres,1999
The brick cathedral, 1979
