From the start, TRIBU architecture have been fascinated by the urban topic. The city, and everything it generates, has thus become their field of research as well as their favourite testing ground.

This permanent obsession also transpires in their approach to architecture, in their dedication, their actions, their communication and their position.

The city is first of all a place of crossing, exchange, encounter – of togetherness; but it also sometimes becomes the place of distance, divergence, separation. It is the place of desires and illusions, of the most beautiful dreams as well as the loudest cries; its own essence agglomerates all the excesses.

What if the definition of these excesses, i.e. of what is too urban, was able to establish the primary qualities of the city, those of togetherness? And what if it was thanks to the definition of these excesses, i.e. of what is too urban, that we were able to re-establish the primary qualities of the city, those of togetherness?

Put forward as a provocative advertising slogan, the term too urban (trop urbain) becomes for this exhibition an emblem as well as a subject of scrutiny.

How is too urban materialized? It is with the help of the fundamentals of urbanity, solid and void and by what defines them: public space, built forms, movements, landscape.

At the meeting point of paradoxes, too urban feeds on images, icons and symbols, opposite or contradictory, collected here on the table in the middle of the room, the locus of debate.

“Too urban?” does not intend to give a single answer or suggest a single way of conceiving a city and togetherness. The ambition of this exhibition is to turn it into a subject of collective research, a common interrogation.

The true essence of too urban is to constantly evolve, like this exhibition, that must be continuously completed and fed by all those too urban and too sophisticated.