Elke Mittmann is an art historian. She studied at the Universities Paris-IV-Sorbonne and Leipzig and holds a doctorate. After working for many years at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, she has been director of the Maison de l'architecture Centre - Val de Loire in Orléans since 2011 and is currently teaching at the École nationale supérieured'architecture de Strasbourg.

After the first volume was published in 2009 under the title Jean-Yves Barrier. Architect and Urbanist / Architecte et Urbaniste, which documented 25 years of his architectural practice, this second volume is dedicated to architecturaland artistic projects since the mid-2000s. While the first volume focused on architectural and urbanistic projects, this second volume presents not only 25 new architectural projects of Barrier, but also a completely different facet of his work:the relationship between architecture and art. In this context, »folding« becomes a fundamental concept that can be applied from design objects to art installations in public spaces and architecture. This new volume also shows once again theastonishing variety of architectural typologies that Barrier deals with in his current oeuvre. Whether it concerns residential buildings, collective housing, public facilities, urban design or functional buildings (such as supermarkets, an employmentoffice or an engineering structure), Barrier never adopts a repetitive or doctrinaire attitude, but develops new solutions for each project, which can be found in his ideal »lexicon of constants«. This is particularly true for the permanent search forurban coherence for the most varied interventions: in city centres, in derelict industrial zonesor in diffuse periurban spaces. Contemporary garden cities, condensed and compact assemblies, collages or the interweaving with what exists represent possibilities for Barrier to requalify and redevelop forgotten or abandoned urban situations with contemporary architecture. This is accompanied by the search to create urban signs and new networks in urban space, with the attempt to perpetuate the existing layers of the city. But it is not only the city that serves him as an architectural projection screen, but also andin particular the manifold interplay between art, design and architecture, which is expressed in a specific method, an edifice of thoughts, which allows him to achieve a creative coherence on these various levels of scale and thus simultaneouslyconnects different disciplines with each other.