Willie Morlon, Grand prize of the jury Van Cleef & Arpels 2024, Wunder Haus

Wunder Haus is the lair of a hands-on builder working to construct his world by assembling disparate elements and materials of all kinds.
A luxurious house as much as a chimerical hut, its construction continues insatiably like a child’s game. This free and random dimension makes architecture a merry-go-round of the imagination and a medium for fiction. It becomes the representation of itself and of our fantasies as builders, able to raise and combine without constraint the hybrid elements of our collectings: objects gleaned along the way, images imprinted in our memory, everything becomes the subject of concrete construction. Considered in relation to other arts, Willie Morlon experiments with materials, their association and their use. Suggested in a tapestry, a wrought-iron and stone elevation or a stained-glass window, construction bears witness to the crafts that make it up, and extends to the frontiers of art and architecture.