A decade of Galerie Philia's designs in dialogue with brutalism at Noisy-le-Grand

Galerie Philia presents STRATES, an exhibition celebrating its tenth anniversary, on view from October 28 – November 30, 2025, across two of the French commune of Noisy-le-Grand's most emblematic brutalist sites: the Mont d’Est parking structure by Jacques Kalisz and Ricardo Bofill’s famed Espaces Abraxas. “Our curatorial approach has always been to place contemporary design in dialogue with charged architectural sites rather than neutral white cubes,” says Ygaël Attali, co-founder and the lead curator of Galerie Philia. “When we encountered Kalisz’s Mont d’Est car park, we felt the same shock of recognition: an extraordinary piece of brutalist architecture, at once monumental and fragile, whose latent potential could be reactivated through design.”

For this anniversary exhibition, each presenting artist and designer contributes a single iconic work created for the design gallery over the past ten years. These pieces—ranging from monumental sculptures to experimental design objects—retrace the gallery’s artistic trajectory while revealing the individual stories and legacies behind each work. For instance, Morghen Studio has developed a monumental light installation that echoes the spiral geometry of the ramps. Lucas and Tyra Morten present furniture design pieces that respond directly to the car park’s structural language, while Milla Vaahtera unveils a lamp that shifts away from her poetic vocabulary toward more geometric expression.

The gallery has cultivated its curatorial identity through design exhibitions embedded in striking architectural contexts, from Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille to Oscar Niemeyer’s MAC Niterói in Brazil. With STRATES, the art gallery shifts its focus to Paris, France, highlighting two masterpieces of late 20th-century architecture. The Mont d’Est parking structure—often likened to a space station or a concrete nave—stands as a testament to the period’s futuristic ideals, while Espaces Abraxas, immortalised in films such as Brazil and The Hunger Games, has earned near-mythic status in contemporary visual culture.

“By weaving these sites together, STRATES reveals the layers of history, imagination and potential that shape Noisy-le-Grand,” notes the gallery in an official release.

The retrospective exhibition also echoes the broader urban transformation currently underway in the Mont d’Est district, where the City of Noisy-le-Grand and SOCAREN are revitalising public spaces, reconnecting the neighbourhood’s different poles and fostering a new cultural dynamic. By involving residents through workshops, participatory programming and encounters with artists, STRATES reactivates public spaces and affirms design as a practice capable of shaping civic imagination.

“Taking its name from Aristotle's concept of ‘philia’—the highest form of friendship and intellectual love—the gallery reflects a deep commitment to connection: between people, between cultures, between time periods, and between the built environment and the objects within it. This relational ethos has shaped every exhibition, residency and partnership the gallery has pursued across its first decade,” the exhibition's text mentions.

“With STRATES, we see ourselves as part of this wider movement—the opening up of formerly cloistered districts to broader publics and the creation of a living exchange with local residents…In five years, I imagine this neighbourhood as a place where architectural heritage is not demolished but reactivated, where the extraordinary vision of architects like Kalisz and Bofill becomes the foundation for new forms of urban vitality. Our exhibition is a modest contribution to that process: by inviting audiences back into these sites, we demonstrate that they are not relics, but still relevant stages for contemporary imagination,” concludes Attali.