Hervé Baley: Spatial Living exhibition catalog
Exhibition catalog designed by Change is Good, with Paul Dagorne, in 2022, for Hervé Baley: Spatial Living, held at Magen H Gallery in New York. Throughout the publication, Change is Good used three styles of BVH’s Anto collection – BVH Anto Plot Mono, BVH Anto Plot and BVH Anto Rounded, echoing the furniture’s shapes.
The publication includes texts by Hugues Magen, scholars Salomé Van Eyde and Ambre Tissot, and Baley’s former student, architect Jean-Pierre Campredon. It showcases a large part of the collection, along historical contexts, provenances and documentation from the architect’s archive, and dives in the depth of Baley’s architectural and creative process and his overall body of work.
This book is the first ever extensive exploration of Hervé Baley’s body of work throughout his career in France and Morocco. As an idealist architect, Hervé Baley was always an advocate of spatial poetry and went against France’s postwar trend favoring Modernism and its rationalistic rigor. Hervé Baley (1933–2010) managed to offer his era something different: a humanist architecture that could stand up to Le Corbusier’s Modernist movement. Predominantly wooden pieces with dynamic constructions, low lines and a rejection of right angles, the pieces included in this exhibition and book are striking demonstrations of the architecture and lifestyle Baley sought to promote. These pieces epitomize the architect’s entire œuvre: imprevisible, contrasted, subtle, and always in line with the environment they were created for.
