STRATES: Layers of Memory and Concrete
By Daniel Leira (IG @danielleira_)
In the eastern outskirts of Paris, where architecture still dares to dream, Galerie Philia celebrates its tenth anniversary with STRATES. This monumental exhibition blends art, design, and architecture on the same plane. The show unfolds across two icons of French brutalism: Jacques Kalisz’s Mont d’Est parking structure and Ricardo Bofill’s Espaces Abraxas, transforming the grey geometry of concrete into a living conversation about imagination, memory, and the future of cities.
Espaces D’Abraxas - Parking Jacques Kalisz | Photo Galerie Philia
Where Form Becomes Dialogue
For a decade, Galerie Philia has built its curatorial voice around site-specific dialogue. From Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille to Oscar Niemeyer’s MAC Niterói in Brazil, its exhibitions have never been static displays but living essays about context. STRATES continues that tradition, situating contemporary design within architecture’s most radical vocabulary. The result is less a retrospective than a landscape — a choreography of sculptures and experimental objects that echo the rhythm of concrete ramps and postmodern façades.
Tripod Black Coffee Table - by KAR | Photo Galerie Philia
Each participating artist revisits a piece from their own history with the gallery, creating a collection that feels both archival and forward-looking. Together, these works form what Philia describes as a “retrospective constellation”: a decade condensed into physical form, in which creative process and urban texture collapse into a single continuous surface.
Brutalism on a Stage
Noisy-le-Grand is not the Paris of postcards. Its monumental silhouettes — once symbols of utopian planning — have often been misunderstood.
Yet in STRATES, Kalisz’s and Bofill’s concrete visions find new resonance. The Mont d’Est structure, sometimes called a “cathedral of concrete,” becomes a meditative spiral for large-scale installations. A few blocks away, the cinematic arches of Espaces Abraxas, immortalized in Brazil and The Hunger Games, host works that explore the theatrical nature of space itself.
X3 Nautile by Elsa Foulon | Photo Galerie Philia
Here, brutalism isn’t just an aesthetic; it’s a memory architecture. It holds the weight of postwar optimism, urban experimentation, and social ambition. STRATES engages that history while offering a contemporary rewrite, one that replaces dystopian imagery with human presence and collective imagination.
From Urban Renewal to Collective Imagination
The exhibition also resonates with the ongoing transformation of the Mont d’Est district, where the City of Noisy-le-Grand and SOCAREN are reimagining public spaces as cultural grounds. In this sense, STRATES is not an isolated event but a civic gesture. Through participatory workshops and open programs, Philia invites residents to engage directly with the works and the site, merging art’s contemplative power with the social dimension of design.
For Galerie Philia, design has always been more than an object; it’s a philosophy of relation, between artist and space, viewer and form, city and citizen. STRATES embodies that vision with precision and poetry.
Concrete, Memory, and the Future
Monolith floor lamp by Paul Matter / Novalis Bench by Michael Gittings / Stag chair by Rick Owens. | Photo Galerie Philia
Something is fitting about celebrating a decade of creative work amid raw concrete and monumental scale. STRATES isnot nostalgic; it’s architectural storytelling in motion. It looks back only to project forward, proving that in the right hands, brutalism is not a relic but a living skin for new ideas.
In the layered echoes of Kalisz and Bofill, Paris discovers a different kind of beauty, one that breathes through its foundations and invites us to see structure as imagination made permanent.
Discover this and other exhibits at
https://www.galerie-philia.com or their Instagram