Skilled Workers Guild: The Empirical Renovations of the Chapuisat Brothers

The Chapuisat Brothers have built their reputation in timber and concrete, having been invited, over the past ten years, into art centres in their Helvetian homeland, France (at Credac d’Ivry-sur-Seine, the Villa Arson in Nice, and the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse), Canada (at Vancouver’s LES Gallery), and recently South Korea (at the Song Eun Art Space in Seoul) to design inhabitable architectural sculptures based on plans that are as complex to construct as they are to explore. For, standing before a work constructed by the Chapuisat Brothers, one has every right to wonder whether the forests of struts and canopies of boards conceal a hidden fault in the host building, or whether their intervention is meant to repair a defect or restore a building subject to escheat. Although their modus operandi borrows from the fact-based logic of TV renovation shows, the conclusions that they lead to do not have the same virtues. Always on the verge of collapse or destruction, their version of renovation does not offer a moral based on ameliorative criteria; instead it opens up an empirical perspective of spiritual transformation, a philosophy that affects the architecture as much as its inhabitants. There is a before and an after Chapuisat.

“Fair and courteous” is the motto adorning the coat of arms of the Chapuisat brotherhood, whose numbers are in constant flux. Gregory, guru-like in appearance and mastermind of the “Brothers,” lives and works in situ, inviting journeymen to join him at each stage of his grand tour. Having worked for many years in tandem with his brother Cyril, he alone now forms the central core of the brotherhood, and the number of brothers and sisters accompanying him is tailored to the ambitions of the construction projects that have flourished in Switzerland, France, and as far away as South Korea. Strictly adopting the journeyman tradition, the Chapuisat Brothers live wherever their empirically and systematically specific projects take them. Like a team of renovators — but less “tacky” and more dishevelled than those on home renovation shows — they create an aura of suspense wherever they land. The invitations that they receive do not conform to the usual call for tenders, which involve precise frameworks, plans, nomenclature, scale models, SketchUp previews, and budgets. The Chapuisats’ method is, paradoxically, one of strict empiricism, and the “solution” temporarily provided to the exhibition space is always acrobatic. Reacting to the architecture, the brotherhood works with basic construction materials: wood, cardboard, insulation, concrete. Qualifying the erected structures as sculptures considerably reduces the aesthetic import of their experiential mazes, for what the Chapuisats construct are labyrinthine hideaways that are camouflaged in the gallery or that grow on makeshift pilings in the middle of a room like viral grafts. Dividing the capacities of the location in this manner, the renovations promise nothing of the happy outcomes of a television program with its succession of “improvements.” Here, they are of a spiritual rather than a structural order, a less tangible yet fundamental ethos that affects walls and users alike. Renovation à la Chapuisat challenges the client, safety committees, and finally the visitor, all of whom, in turn, are disoriented by the vague parameters of the impending challenge. As for the site, it is literally unhinged, diverted from its primary function to accommodate this amiable architectonic colonization.