Le Visiteur

It is unusual today to come across encounters between built objects and critical judgments. It is also unusual to find opportunities to experience the work of practitioners who operate outside the closed circles of the media, or to admire the results of truly free thinking. In a cultural and publishing landscape that is jaded and weary of seeing the same ubiquitous architects authoring the same major projects all over the world, Le Visiteur seeks to promote achievements that are exemplary in the way they accommodate to our real behaviors and shape our towns and cities. Giving these projects their due means encouraging an intellectual effort supported nowhere else, except perhaps in the idea of professional activity understood as an act of faith. This journal is published in a world in which general interest in architecture continues to decline, under the combined pressures of the cult of the image, regulatory excesses, and the bureaucratic separation of responsibilities in construction projects and land use planning. Yet architects do still exist who think and act in support of an architecture that is committed to honest persuasion rather than cheap seduction.