Exposition Les "Arbres de Paris" - La nature comme source d'inspiration

Watercolours and sepia ink drawings by Yanosh KALDY, architect and graphic artist

Presentation of the exhibition For an Architect, for a Painter, Paris and its trees are sources of inspiration: parks, gardens, squares, avenues, secret alleyways, school playgrounds, discreet places, cemeteries or shared gardens. Each arrondissement strives to set nature between the cobblestones, to raise trees between the buildings, and to cultivate foliage, which protects its inhabitants and moderates the climate.

The tree, admired throughout the ages for its power, its material and the nobility of its forms, is now, particularly in urban areas, recognised and respected for its regulating, protective and restorative virtues in the face of the many pollutions created by Man in less than two centuries.

My paternal grandmother’s house, in a small village in Transdanubia, was 500 metres from a large state forest. As a child, I often went there to pick ceps or to stroll, to look at and listen to the trees in their natural environment, “at home”! As an adult, living in an urban setting, an artificial world, I notice the “humanising” contribution of trees. Our hyperactive society has more than ever need of the beauty, serenity and calm of trees.

The tree has inspired and still inspires our constructions, our architecture: it is the “trunk, the body, the column” with its “branches, its arms, the ribbed arches” of our cathedrals, but also the modern structures of contemporary architecture, organic architecture, timber or steel framing.

I have learned, empirically, through observation and by drawing them, that trees are as varied as human beings. Each tree has its own character; no two are alike on Earth. Beauty in difference.

P.S. Paris is one of the most wooded capitals in Europe.