The architect’s vanity | Geneva Tribune

For an author as for an architect, each creation is part of a sort of large and mysterious global “plan” while approaching it as an exercise in style. This is how to “construct” this character who has ceased to be, while almost never leaving each page, the author breaks the codes of biography, legal investigation and the epistolary novel.

From the first page, this short book draws the reader into the quest of a man who was himself in search of something in his specialty. This is surely why the 84 pages of this very beautiful text are subtitled “investigation” while being able to extend into a reflection on architecture, artistic creation in all its forms and the place it can occupy in a trading society. Especially when we have to build a temple or a sanctuary which must be dedicated to it to celebrate its worship.

Investigation therefore because the portrait of Grisel first emerges through statements linked to the disaster. A sort of entry into history. And to climb the levels of personality, you have to climb a staircase of letters. Thus, correspondence with his ex-wife and a young architecture student who became his mistress spread the architect, unravel his character and sculpt the man without unraveling his entire mystery.

This hollow portrait becomes clearer as much as it becomes blurred and also becomes confused in the fragments that a computer scientist extracted from the hard drive of a computer found in the apartment of the deceased. This dive into the buried bits thus seems to unearth fragments of the unconscious, between thoughts, delusions, speculations and scraps of ideas. And the Grisel mystery ends with a tale in the form of a key that his ex-wife exhumes from the papers she kept.

In its dry brevity and in the richness of its form, “The Architect” ultimately has something of a Jansenist conceit. Charles E. Racine unfolds his message fluidly with precision, guided by the harmony of a Modulor. Letters, depositions, fragments of hard drives allow the author to express the breadth of his register, his mastery of expression, his art of chiaroscuro, but this display of know-how, this technical mastery are not put forward only to support a certain idea of ​​counting, to support a demand for austerity, to issue a warning about the programmed arrival of the final ends.

“The architect”, by Charles E. Racine, Éditions d’En Bas, 85 pages. September 2024.

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Philippe Villard is editor-in-chief of the Tribune de Genève. In more than twenty years of career, he practiced journalism in various French-speaking media and was a teacher at the Journalism and Media Training Center in Lausanne. He is also the author of a novel entitled “Plume-Patte”.More info

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