Festival des Architectures Vives: The Latest Architecture and News

This past year marked a period of introspection for architecture. As 2025 unfolded, the discipline, confronted with evolving environmental and social realities, entered a broader turning point in how it understands its role and how users engage with it. Throughout the year, exhibitions shifted focus away from buildings as isolated objects toward a broader understanding of relationships between ecology, equity, everyday life, and collective imaginaries. Across institutions and cities, they operated less as showcases and more as discursive platforms: places where architecture was not only presented, but also imagined, questioned, and collectively redefined.

While exhibitions have long functioned as sites of discourse, politics, and community, this role became more explicit in 2025. As Carlo Ratti noted in an ArchDaily interview during the pre-opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, exhibitions today can "hybridize the way that people come together," an ambition that echoed across cities and institutions as exhibitions evolved into spaces for debate, experimentation, and collective reflection. Exhibitions are places where architects and designers meet, where conversations unfold openly with the public, and where ideas emerge through spontaneous exchanges among passersby. Exhibitions became spaces where architectural discourse extended beyond professional circles, opening conversations to broader publics through everyday encounters, shared experiences, and informal exchanges.

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Every year, the Festival is visited by a large public. In 2018, it received 18 000 visitors and has been widely published in France and abroad.
For the 14th edition, the Festival des Architectures Vives in Montpellier will take place from June the 11th to the 16th 2019. The festival thematic is Beauty. The FAV will keep to aware a wide public to architecture, to highlight a young generation of architects and to discover places from the urban heritage.

The south of France is known for its endless beaches, nineteenth century architecture, lush greenery, and monuments to its storied history. For nearly a decade, Le Festival des Architectures Vives (Festival of Lively Architecture) has been infusing contemporary architecture into the staid Southern French landscape through the creation of an array of artful temporary pavilions. Beginning in 2006 and 2013 respectively, the towns of Montpellier and La Grande Motte have played host to a series of structures designed to animate historical segments of the two cities. Founded with a mission to celebrate the seminal work of burgeoning architects, the festival aims to produce meaningful and interactive works designed to activate the historic centres of the two ageing cities.

Explore the bizarre and inspired installations of Le Festival des Architectures Vives after the break.

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In 2015 the Festival was visited by not less than 15,000 visitors and was committed to raising awareness in schools and in 2015 it was 31 kindergarten and primary classes that took part in this new program. For its 11th edition the Festival des Architectures Vives will take place in Montpellier from June 15th to 19th 2016, the FAV La Grande Motte will take place from June the 18th to 26th 2016. Innovate is the key word for this edition. Still, the FAV will continue its work to raise the general public's awareness to architecture, to highlight the young architects generation and to make discover unexpected places of urban heritage.

Videos

For the 10th Festival des Architectures Vives in Montpellier, Syracuse University commissioned a team to design an installation in the courtyard of Hôtel Audessan. The project, “Trans(inter)ference,” was a 3D drawing designed and constructed by Maya Alam and Daniele Profeta, with the help of three Syracuse University students.

Focusing on the in-between of architecture, the project favors the space between idea and resolution, "between old and new." The installation was developed by projecting the facades of Hôtel Audessan through one another, creating a labyrinth of layered views.

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FAKT, an up-and-coming studio based out of Berlin and Zurich, has created an architectural installation for the Festival des Architectures Vives, which uses perforated aluminum sheets to produce a cloudscape. Sponsored by metalworking companies Karl Dieringer and AMAG Austria Metall, the exhibition explores aluminum's material properties and its ability to create new forms.

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Each summer, the French cities of Montpellier and La Grande Motte host Le Festival Des Architectures Vives (Festival of Lively Architecture). These twin festivals seek to raise awareness about architecture among the public, and to give needed exposure to the work of up-and-coming designers. In the process, they also draw attention to previously unknown places in the two cities—in Montpellier, many of the private courtyards in the city are opened to the public specifically for the festival. In La Grande Motte, the exhibition weaves its way through the city center, a site designated as “Heritage of the 20th Century” due to the prevalence of works designed by architect Jean Balladur. This year’s festivals featured a total of 18 temporary installations. Read more about the festivals, and view photos, after the break.

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