The context

Parents of pupils from the nursery school of Pougues-les-Eaux commissioned a work in the form of a playground for the park of the former spa town.

The commission

In line with the specific characteristics of the site, Wilfrid Almendra then proposed a set of four concrete modules based on the plan of the foundations of the hotel Le Splendid (formerly located in the same place and now disappeared). These elements for children's play surround a vertical building for climbing that reinterprets the Monument for Reconstruction by Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys.

It should be recalled that the ideal city New Babylon imagined by Constant proposed a new model of organization of spaces, based on mobility, the circulation of men, according to their desire and according to a desired principle of disorientation: all this being similar to a societal model of rapprochement of men which would privilege the personal development of each person, would value leisure, imagination and creativity, as a way of life.

A project that is considered as a utopia and that the artist proposes to revive through the very real use by children of his environmental sculpture as a field of exploration and invention.

Wilfrid Almendra

Born in 1972, Wilfrid Almendra creates sculptures and installations. He is interested in the Pavilion's destiny of our habitat in response to the modernist utopia of large ensembles and its relationship to a certain individual imagination including a conception of the community moving from "living together" to "living next door".

Tensioning this return between individualism and standardization, he observes with empathy the way in which men adapt to their living environment, tracking the expression of their aspirations behind the architectural and decorative motifs resulting from these developments.

Like the arrangements of the American sculptor Robert Grosvenor, he is one of the best representatives of an art of socio-aesthetic mixing that appeared at the turn of the century.