French architect Christophe Benichou has designed diamond-shaped housing created for an animated short film. The project, called Windbracing, tributes to "La Horde du Contrevent" (Windwalkers), a science fiction book by French author Alain Damasio. The project is sculpted by aeraulic constraints, but also a work on the inclusion, the interdependence and the connection of the elements to the whole.

In a wind-swept world, a super-trained troop attempts each generation to walk upstream to the source of that permanent breath, hoping to find it a meaning. This philosophical epic is a magnificent praise to the link, and a superb thought on the relation to the constraint and the surpassing of oneself. 

Video courtesy of Christophe Benichou

"Windbracing pays tribute to this story and these values, offering a sensory dive in a universe freely inspired by Damasios’," said Benichou. 

"In text, sound, and image, he invites the viewer to question his eye on what seems to be a hostile environment at first glance, from the inhospitable to the osmosis, by way of a form of cohabitation."

Windbracing stages a hamlet in the wind, a sort of petrification of the Horde, whose fixity or movement seems uncertain. Its habitats form a diamond- shaped network, housing a nurturing heart and an agora. At the back, a wind organ produces for the downstream the story of an exchange with the movement, and, like a rudder, seems to direct the hamlet towards the origin of the wind. 

The network is unified by a protective crater and wall system, homage to the vineyards of the Geria in Lanzarote, whose windy volcanic slopes, desolate and beautiful, inspired the environment of windbracing.

The geometric figures combine to complement each other: the square is nestled in the circle and then folds into triangles to accompany the wind. A game of homothety then resonates the habitat in the hamlet, and the hamlet in the infinite, story of cooperation and harmony essential to life.

Project facts

Text: Zoé Guillot
Effects: Antony Pastor
Music: Thomas Martin
Animation 3D: Thibaut Miossec 

Concept & realisation: Christophe Benichou 

All images © Christophe Benichou

> via Christophe Benichou Architectures