L’architecture naturelle des romans d’André Bucher

[Autom. eng. transl.] Since Vitruvius, "architecture is the area of predilection for an anchorage in the real, a territorialization" (Antoine Leygonie) enslaved to the hardness of the soil and gravity. André Bucher's novels are rooted in the steep and depopulated landscapes of the Drôme mountains, a territory that the writer-farmer has known since the 1970s: his prose is punctuated by metaphors built on the interaction, or even the permutation between the human element and the natural environment. It is interesting to analyze Bucher's novels from the principles of the "natural" house of the architect FL Wright. A singular convergence is indeed at work: the search for an integral architecture, in other words "organic" between the building and its environment, the ideal of plasticity, the prominence of simple materials, the continuity between the interior and the exterior, an aesthetic based on the natural and on the tree as paragon of the building to come. It turns out that the "natural house" derived from Bucher's novels does not correspond to the fragile buildings that man could build, but rather to the complex and inconstant networks of relationships that are woven between man and the Earth, his true "house". In this sense, his works seem to broaden Wright's principles by emphasizing the concept of porosity between the work of man and that of nature. We present here an emblematic novel by Bucher (The Last Chance Mountain, 2015) through these structures (narrative, stylistic, rhetorical) where, in an original way, resonates the natural architecture of Wright.