François Chaslin, a leading figure on the architectural scene, has died

“Like a bird on an electric wire, like a drunken singer in a midnight mass choir, I tried in my own way to be free…” Sung in English by Leonard Cohen – in Bird on the Wire (1968) – these words could have been those of François Chaslin. A leading figure on the architectural scene, the man loved song. He loved cinema, literature, the sea, cities, but also “birds, insects, worn materials, the smell of boxwood, the night, the sound of the wind, storms,” as he boasted in a 2019 interview with the journal Urbanisme. He was one of those free thinkers born in the middle of the last century who found in architecture a matrix giving them a grasp of all the richness of the world. His death on Thursday, August 7, at the age of 76, in Lanildut (Finistère) where he had a house, leaves his friends devastated and the world of architecture deeply distraught.

It was on Crapaud Beach, where he used to swim, that he took his last breath. Seized by a faint, he drowned. A sudden surge gave him the strength to return to the beach where he died in the arms of his wife, Sophie Dauchez-Chaslin, symbolizing a life he remained in control of to the very end.

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