"The Soulages Museum was built from 2010 to 2014, following the success of the international competition (2008), by the Catalan architects RCR: Ramon Vilalta, Carme Pigem, and Rafael Aranda. Their architectural work is collegiate, the signature is shared, so much so that their sketches, plans, and constructions are simply RCR Arquitectes."
Benoît Decron, Chief Curator of Heritage. Director of the Soulages Museum, Rodez.
The exhibition of the architects' work marks its launch in 2020 with the opening of the Centre Pompidou collection in Paris at the Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle. The Soulages Museum exhibition is the continuation of this adventure, in which, in addition to exhibiting part of the collection presented at the Pompidou Centre, it is accompanied by new designs and future projects. A link is generated between what has been done and what will be done.
"Ici et ailleurs, la matière et le temps" by RCR Architects. Photograph by T. Estadieu.
This exhibition serves as a retrospective of the mark left on Rodez and the Aveyron landscape and the relationship established between the artist Pierre Soulages and Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramón Vilalta, founders of the architectural studio.
"The Soulages Museum, a long, semi-buried construction with parallelepipeds clad in Corten steel, this steel iridescent with rust, extends to the north of the city of Rodez: "a museum in a garden", as the painter Pierre Soulages wished, who chose it as a setting for his works, to enhance his collections. Its construction was an experience of encounters and exchanges between the active artist and the architects, a transmission. The Soulages Museum at RCR has become a highly appreciated meeting place for contemporary architecture enthusiasts."
Benoît Decron, Conservador jefe del patrimonio. Director del museo Soulages, Rodez
"Ici et ailleurs, la matière et le temps" by RCR Architects. Photograph by T. Estadieu.
"The whole of what is presented speaks of the fundamental and characteristic features of the architects, that is to say, of the essentiality of the architectural approach and the non-negotiable link with Nature in its broadest sense (landscape, sky, vegetation, air, etc.), but also of the great diversity of the work, which encompasses fields that go beyond architecture itself and landscape."
RCR Arquitectes. Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, Ramon Vilalta
The exhibition takes place in three spaces. The first, located under the foyer, is reserved for the Soulages Museum project, with its respective models, updates, and projections. The next space, the hall, shows all the architecture, designs, references, thoughts, and models in a forest and landscape setting. The last part of the exhibition, located behind a paper curtain, shows the future projects of the architectural studio, marking the time path that RCR has taken.
