Axel de Stampa

An architect based in Donibane Lohizune (San Juan de Luz, Lapurdi), Axel de Stampa runs the WEEK architecture studio, where he develops a committed and transversal practice, exploring housing as well as scenography and experimental research. At all scales, his projects question uses, lifestyles and the relationship between architecture, society and ecology.

Since the creation of the 1WEEK1PROJECT collective in 2013, Axel de Stampa explores modes of representation in architecture, especially through the moving image. This initiative, highlighted by media such as AD Magazine, allows him to offer a critical and sensitive look on the contemporary challenges of the architectural project. At the crossroads between art and architecture, his work also enriches his teaching work, which he develops in workshops in various schools of architecture and design.

In 2017, he won the FAIRE Paris competition with Îlot Vert, a floating ecological installation on the Seine, made from plastic waste collected in Paris. This project marks the beginning of a deep reflection on plastic as a material and its implications in architecture.

The scenography then becomes a laboratory where experimentation with materials, textures and imperfections occupies a central place. Each project gives rise to numerous prototypes, in a logic of renewal of the modes of architectural representation.

This exhibition presents three main axes of his work:

• Texture, which constitutes the major part of the exhibition, presents a material created by fusion to produce chromatic ranges;
• Diagram, which explores an abstraction of the conceptual schemes of architectural projects;
• My Own Private Idaho, a work made with artificial intelligence that creates a visual link between its blue and black periods through utopian landscapes.

Axel de Stampa builds a singular work where experimentation becomes method and where architecture is lived as much as it is thought.