For years, Katherine Lapierre has been looking for people who build their own houses without asking anyone's permission. She is an architect by training and an artist who makes models and sculptures of her own. The Centre de design de l'UQAM is putting both halves of that life in the same room. Architectures outsider, subtitled Relevés et archisculptures de Katherine Lapierre, runs from October 22 to December 10, 2026, at 1440 rue Sanguinet in Montreal.
The show is built around models and screen-printed architectural drawings, split into two deliberately interwoven groups. The first is documentary. Nine models reproduce outsider architectures, mostly in Quebec and France, that Lapierre has been tracking since her doctoral research. The second is her own work: sixteen model-sculptures, some of them spun out of the survey work, some in direct conversation with Jean Dubuffet's Tour aux figures, Friedrich Kiesler's Endless House or the Palais idéal of Facteur Cheval, and some grown from humbler starting points, a stone, a charred log, a blown-glass fish scale, which she scans, prints in 3D and turns into the seed of an imaginary building.
The word in the title is borrowed. Outsider Art was the English phrase Roger Cardinal proposed in 1972 to translate Jean Dubuffet's art brut, and Lapierre's doctoral thesis, defended in 2015 under the title Catalogue raisonné d'architectures outsiders: repères historiques et théoriques accompagnés d'un parcours non exhaustif, au Québec, en France et en Belgique, carried the idea over into building. Her argument, roughly, is that there is an architecture without architects, made on the margins of the discipline's logic, and that it deserves the same serious cataloguing that art brut eventually received. The nine survey models are the result of that cataloguing: on-site measuring, dimensioned plans, photographs, technical drawings and interviews with the builders themselves. Each model sits on a wooden topographic base that reproduces the actual landscape of the construction, so the object is not just a house but the ground it was dropped onto.
The builders on the list are a strange and wonderful company. Roméo Vachon's Cheval à Méo, in the Beauce, is a giant horse built in the 1970s with his wife Lucienne, and local heritage accounts say it has been visited by 100,000 people; it now stands beside the Resto chez Méo in Saint-Séverin, where the municipality has treated it as the village's identity and built a playground around it. Richard Greaves, a Montrealer born in 1952 who studied hotel management, graphic design and then theology before turning his back on the city in 1984, contributes two works, the Maison aux fenêtres and the Maison ronde, cabins that look ready to collapse and seem to defy gravity. Clément Côté appears twice, with the Château d'Émilie and the Bistro Don Camillo. Sappho Morissette and Jean-Guy Ruel built the Bidule in Waterloo. Claude Drolet built the Château de Lochaber. Daniel Hamelin runs the Fol Galerie et Jardin Fou in Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies, in Chaudière-Appalaches. And from Ardèche, in France, comes the Maison Unal, designed by Claude Häusermann-Costy and built by Joël Unal between 1972 and 2008, a bubble house with barely a right angle in it, part of what is sometimes called sculpted architecture.
What makes the exhibition unusual is that the same person did the measuring and the dreaming. Lapierre's survey drawings use the most rational tools available, plans, sections, dimensions, and yet, as Nicolas Reeves writes in La mesure des songes, a text published in the exhibition booklet, they try to describe morphologies that, like those of living things, cannot be reduced to measurement and resist any geometric description. That tension is the show's real subject. The screen-printed drawings, including sections and plans of works such as the Villa Cap-aux-Corneilles, Tour II and Troglodyte, are presented as prints rather than working documents, which quietly makes the point that a survey can be an artwork.
Lapierre has shown before. Her outsider architectures appeared at the Maison de l'architecture du Québec in giant models, sketches and drawings, where the gallery described her as walking in the footsteps of her models and sometimes getting ahead of them, building in balsa, plaster and wire in her studio. Her work has also been seen at AXENÉO7, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, the Société des arts technologiques and Galerie Montcalm, and at the British School at Rome. The Centre de design version is the first time the nine survey models have been shown there, and the first time the two bodies of work have been hung as one argument.
The booklet that accompanies the show includes biographies of each builder, descriptions of the projects, suggested routes linking related works, and two original essays, Daniel Canty's Animaux rêveurs à l'ouvrage and Reeves's La mesure des songes. Canty's text sets the scene plainly: in every corner of Quebec, and therefore of the world, one finds unusual houses cobbled together from makeshift materials salvaged from the endless flow of lumber, steel, concrete, fibreglass and urethane that our civilization produces. Evans, in his curatorial statement, goes further, insisting that architecture does not belong only to architects and that there have always been people possessed by the dream of a space to build, almost in spite of themselves.
The Centre de design itself has been making this kind of argument since 1981, when professors at the École de design founded it. It has produced more than 400 exhibitions and sent travelling shows to more than ten countries, and it remains one of the few venues in Canada devoted to graphic, industrial, fashion and urban design as well as architecture. Architectures outsider fits that mandate almost too neatly: it is a design exhibition about people who never called themselves designers. Victor Bernaudon designed the installation and Cécile Tousignant handled the graphic design and the publication; Tousignant is also part of the curatorial team.
Lapierre's own summary is the least romantic and most useful. The works in the show, she writes, escape the canons of conventional architecture, showcase atypical and often salvaged materials, and make free use of construction techniques. The model-sculptures, for their part, are a way to ask how an outsider design practice might renew our understanding of habitat and of architecture's social role. In the end, she suggests, outsider architecture comes close to bricolage: no theoretical rules, no norms, open to any proposition. The exhibition is free, and group tours can be reserved at any time through [email protected].