A look in the rear-view mirror. Not a funeral or nostalgic exercise. Rather a snapshot on what is behind us, dead but not buried. About those memories who still nourish and inspire you.

[recto] Starting with Giambattista Nolli (Como,1701-Rome,1756), maestro in content and form, with his powerful and generous cartography in a vision of the city that we share, where its vital energy extends behind the facades, to the interiors of the buildings. The plans of archived Ouest projects (mainly lost competitions), which nevertheless inspire our current practice, constitute the carpet of this imaginary and invisible city of the dead, where passages of scale are authorized and welcome.

[verso] In a similar way memories to the work of these artists, writers, filmmakers, inhabit our practice, with an impressively actual and accurate power. The notions of a city in continuous change, imperfect and by definition unfinished, the idea of both organizing things while participating in a certain trouble, of living together, complex and intriguing, and of curiosity towards others (in time and space) in a specific collection of common references, the electric energy of the city, … are all qualities and ideas that we modestly try to keep alive in the agency’s projects.