\u201cFair and courteous\u201d 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 \u201cBrothers,\u201d lives and works in situ, inviting journeymen to join him at each stage of his grand tour<\/em>. 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\u200a\u2014\u200abut less \u201ctacky\u201d and more dishevelled than those on home renovation shows\u200a\u2014\u200athey 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\u2019 method is, paradoxically, one of strict empiricism, and the \u201csolution\u201d 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 \u201cimprovements.\u201d Here, they are of a spiritual rather than a structural order, a less tangible yet fundamental ethos that affects walls and users alike. Renovation \u00e0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In late winter 2013, France\u2019s Maubuisson Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery that has been a contemporary art centre for over ten years, welcomed the Chapuisat Brothers (Le Buisson Maudit<\/em>, 2013). Since constructing within the twelfth-century walls required not touching the building\u2019s frame, the work was self-supporting; and because empiricism allows for flexibility, Gregory Chapuisat conceived of a suspended labyrinth, supported by a forest of wooden struts. The wood piling supported a canopy of finely cut raw timber boards of fragile aspect that traversed the chapter house, skimming the crossed ogives. The team formed and grew to about ten members, who settled in and colonized the premises by living there for the duration of the project. Inspections intensified to assure the viability of the construction; fire fighters responsible for authorizing the opening of the exhibition to the public made frequent visits to the art centre to understand and test the progression of the labyrinth\u2019s route before declaring it safe. And it must be said that the route was not simple. Several emergency escape hatches had to be incorporated, and the region\u2019s elite rescue workers even came to train regularly in the structure, as it posed challenges from which cadets could gain valuable experience. The technical expertise required to keep these tons of wood aloft without the support of the surrounding building forms the epilogue to a lengthy and uncertain project, for empiricism is not always compatible with the administrative and procedural limits of public exhibition space management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The human exploration of the construction itself is a very appealing aspect for the permanent members of the teams, who must come to terms with the frustrations of visitors who are incapable of entering the work due to claustrophobia, excess weight, physical condition, or age. This initiation can take place only on the conditions set by the Chapuisats, whose physical stature determines the size of the entrances and passageways. Experiencing one of their works opens the door to a different state: the brave achieve the status of initiates who have endured the ordeal, following the example of the skilled journeymen who execute their work in quest of spiritual transformation and the perfecting of their art. The art of being a spectator is thus enhanced through the practical experience of an environment owing to the Chapuisat Brothers. The space temporarily \u201crenovated\u201d in this manner offers a temporal and physical experience beyond the exhibition and the reality of the art centre. An unrestrained space, chaotic and disorganized in appearance, liberated from its usual contingencies, a zone free of obligations and regulations situated in the standardized space of an institutional building, the result of this subjective and empirical renovation frees the architecture of its habits. If there is an improvement or renovation in the ameliorative sense of the term, paradoxically one must seek it in the disorder brought about by the Chapuisats, in the disruption of the usual functioning of the space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This functional hijacking that the \u201cfair and courteous\u201d brothers engage in reaches its peak \u201ceffectiveness\u201d in the context of a domestic construction, such as the mountain chalet in Vercorin that they transformed in the summer of 2012. The abandoned dwelling was left to the conversion talents of the empirical renovation team, which grafted onto the interior of the structure, up to the ridgeboard of the roof, a labyrinth of raw fir planks, concealing convivial spaces, including a dining room, reading areas, bedrooms, and a belvedere. The austere chalet, colonized by the viral and chaotic architecture that now crowned the building with a bristling dome made of pale wood, experienced its last summer in a vitalist explosion. The temporary, almost rickety renovation endowed it with unique charm, generating intense activity in the form of visits to a previously desolate place, despite poor access to this community Grail. The colony of wood was occupied by the brothers, hosts happily devoted to passing on their nomadic ideal. Transformed into a living organism to be penetrated by climbing and hauling oneself up as though one were navigating an H\u00e9bertist obstacle course, the R\u00e9sidence secondaire<\/em> generated a new form of life and communion, a dynamogenic transition before the decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this respect, the Chapuisat Brothers guild members analyze and question architectural determinism with a critical perspicacity that Gordon Matta-Clark (whose Anarchitecture cut through norms and conventions with a chainsaw) would not have shunned. The very experience of Matta-Clark\u2019s extreme building cuts in abandoned apartments and houses during the 1970s, the menace to the body as a point of reference, and the quasi-performative challenge of navigating such spaces form the fundamental aesthetic foundations of Chapuisian constructions. The very ethos of a project such as Food<\/em> (a community restaurant in New York\u2019s Soho neighbourhood established by Matta-Clark in 1972) corresponds to the community effect that underlies the majority of Chapuisat constructions open to sharing. The kinship between the brotherhood and the \u201cmaster\u201d Matta-Clark, however, transcends these obvious similarities. In 1976, Matta-Clark aspired to launch a social and architectural renovation project in the Loisaida (derived from the Hispanic pronunciation of Lower East Side) neighbourhood of Manhattan and thus metabolize his acts of architectural dissidence in the direction of communities.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - \u201cA Resource Center and Environmental Youth Program for Loisaida.\u201d See Mary-Jane Jacob, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark. A Retrospective<\/em> (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985).<\/span> An actual training program for \u201cenvironmental cadets\u201d was developed in order to convert and renovate apartment buildings in an experimental fashion, and, by a process of \u201ccontagion,\u201d transform the individuals involved. Ahead of its time, the Loisaida project remained unrealized\u200a\u2014\u200ano doubt due to its anarchic methods and the unconventional nature of Matta-Clark\u2019s \u201crenovations\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200ayet it carried the seed for what today characterizes the essence of \u201cChapuisism,\u201d the transformative potential that is instilled in the Chapuisat Brothers\u2019 architectonic experiments and that imbues the spaces with unforeseeable vitality without being based on any functional amelioration. The renovation deregulates the destiny of the space, liberating both the structure and its users. Worthy spiritual sons of Matta-Clark, they have constructed a nomadic identity that allows them to dramatically change a building, occupying the spaces to carry out a subtle yet radical renovation, revealing both the hidden shortcomings and the qualities of the structures. Long after the work has disappeared, there is indeed an after<\/em>-Chapuisat, a spirit of renovation whose effects cannot immediately be measured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft]<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/80_DO03_Ramade_Chapuisat_Vercorin-2-scaled.jpg\")
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La r\u00e9sidence secondaire<\/em>, Vercorin, Suisse, 2012.
Photo : Robert Hofer, permission des artistes | courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/80_DO03_Ramade_Chapuisat_Le-buisson-maudit-scaled.jpg\")
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Le buisson maudit<\/em>, Abbaye de Maubuisson, France, 2013.
Photo : Catherine Brossais, permission des artistes | courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n