DICTIONNAIRE AMOUREUX ILLUSTRÉ DE L’ARCHITECTURE

From mountain chalets to Brutalist buildings, from water towers to contemporary wineries, from Flemish beguinages to Vauban’s citadels, Jean-Michel Wilmotte takes us on a personal journey through the geography of architecture.

In these pages, he recounts his encounters with the great masters—Oscar Niemeyer, Tadao Andō, Ieoh Ming Pei—and shares his emotions before materials and details: raw concrete, Carrara marble, wood, the joinery of Carlo Scarpa. He also explores his fascination with places that continue to inhabit us long after we have left them.

Far from being an exhaustive inventory, this Dictionnaire amoureux offers a sensitive narrative in which architecture reveals itself as a matter of light, proportion, and silence. Each entry—whether devoted to a universally acclaimed masterpiece or to an unassuming building discovered along the way—bears witness to the same conviction: architecture cannot be reduced to forms or styles; above all, it is a lived experience.

The photographs, selected for their precision and poetry, extend the emotion and invite us to discover these works from a different perspective.

Between an admiration for the 1950s, a deep attachment to Italy, and a passion for discovery, Jean-Michel Wilmotte shares a vision that never ceases to marvel. For architecture does not merely shape the world around us: it also nourishes our imagination and our dreams.

Publication date: 22 October 2026

Price: €45