A Sensitive Journey of an Architect

Everyone knows an architect who draws. An architect who never stops drawing—in the margins, while traveling, upon waking, between construction sites, on a corner of a tablecloth—is something else entirely. Henri Gaudin kept 253 notebooks between 1969 and 2012. Not commissioned notebooks: logbooks. Architectural sketches, charcoal landscapes, watercolor portraits, graphite self-portraits, theoretical reflections scribbled in ink.

He called it a "breeding ground", a place where intuition precedes calculation, where the hand searches before the mind decides. Twice winner of the Équerre d'argent, theorist of an architecture attentive to the body and to so-called "minor" forms, Gaudin designed the École normale supérieure de Lyon and the renovation of the Guimet museum, among others. But it is in these pages – donated to the BnF in 2023 by his sons – that we come closest to his method: iterative, sensitive, nourished by a voracious visit to museums and a stubborn refusal to separate drawing and thought, art and science. The exhibition presents some forty of these, accompanied by drawings and prints, like an interior edifice that one would explore room by room.

BNF FRANÇOIS-MITTERRAND
From May 12 to July 12, 2026
Quai François-Mauriac, 75013
Metro Bibliothèque F.-Mitterrand (14)
Tue. to Sat. 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Sun. 1 p.m.-7 p.m. - Closed Mon.
Free entry