One more reason to visit Paris this year

Wow, this seems like an exhibition tailor-made for me.
Architecture and comic books in one place! 
It turns out, there are other people besides me that thinks there is a connection between architecture and comic books beside the gigantic amount of caffeine comsumed by professionals in both fields, particularly when deadline beckons. And what city is more perfect to display that than Paris?

From June 2010 to November 2011, Paris will hold..er...is holding an exhibition that explores the connections bteween architecture and comics, in their historical and prospective aspects (photographs, archives, original drawings), and overlaps the visions of international cartoonists and architects. The exhibition entitled "Archi & BD", presented to the general public or remind fans of the comic, the relationship between comics and architecture. 
Five teams of architects and one cartoonist are invited to produce an original work for the exhibition. Some big names from the comic book world will be present : Tardi, Moebius, Bilal, Juillard. While from the architecture side, names like Herzog and deMeuron should prove an intereresting juxtaposition.
Here is the link to the exhibition's website and if your French is abit rusty, I took the liberty of translating it for you here :

By the early twentieth century with authors such as Winsor McCay (Little Nemo), George McManus (The family Illico), Frank O. King (Gasoline Alley) and Alain Saint-Ogan (Zig and Puce), the comic explores the city, fascinated by the emerging world it symbolizes. 

This theme not only of the city, but factors related immediate as architecture, urban planning, design, history or politics, has become the ideal terrain for aesthetic descriptions and reflections on the contemporary world with authors like Francis Schuiten Benoit Peeters, Enki Bilal, Moebius ...  

The exhibition will examine, without desire for completeness, the representations of the city in the comics. 

The paper is chronological, from the 1900s to today with a presentation, at the end of exposure, specific projects: the imaginary city of Villemolle Hammerheads of the Hergé Museum, House of Glass, commissioned by Jean Nouvel of strip authors drawn. 

This chronology will be punctuated by references to the cities. New York, Paris and Tokyo will be viewed through the prism of authors such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, David Mazzuchelli, Riad Sattouf for New York Blutch Tardi, Dupuy-Berberian in Paris; Jiro Taniguchi, Osamu Tezuka, Toiyo Matsumoto, Urasawa Maoki for Tokyo. This international dimension will be confirmed by the presence of Chinese and Korean authors. 

The exhibition will also suggest affiliations or affinities between authors of different generations, like the "clear line" of the late 1970s (Joost Swarte, Ted Benoit, Floc'h ...) which made reference to Belgian masters in comics for years 1950-1960: Andre Franquin, Maurice Tilleux, Will ... 

A variety of works and authors in a unique scenery 

The exhibition "Archi & BD" offer the public a broader vision of artistic and cultural density of comics on a century of creation. The set design, signed by the agency Projectiles and unprecedented in its proposal for lighting and space, will highlight the works presented. 

A total of 150 international writers and 350 works contributed to this exhibition will also offer insights into the current period when the comic new frontiers in the creation, with cartoonists close to contemporary art, Jochen Gerner, Ilan Manouach, Dominique Goblet, Thierry Van Hasselt, Christopher Hittinger. 

A course for young audiences will also be proposed. 

Fictions and representations of urban architecture  

This exhibition consists of a dialogue between architecture and the band dessinéeDes models, sketches, plans or achievements of cities, public buildings and villas, designed by Utopia greatest architects remember that familiarity imaginary. 

In counterpoint to the boards of cartoonists, where the city is heroin, the architects' work shows influences from 9th art ... This corner of the exhibition puts the emphasis is on the way of representing the architecture and the city, and its attempt to explore a universe designed related, since the 1910s (Sant'Elia) until today (BIG, Herzog and De Meuron, Andrés Jaque ...), through 1970 (Archigram, Coop Himmelblau, John Balladur ...). 

So many visions of the city, revealing an appetite foresight and desire to explore new ways of life. In London, Vienna, Madrid or Paris as it is an invitation to travel through the invention of writing fiction and urban metropolitan scenarios most fantastic.  

In order that the meeting between architecture and comics were relevant, the City wished to outsource about exposure to Jean-Marc Thevenet, director of the International Festival of Comics Festival from 1998 to 2006, and Francis Rambert, director of the French Institute of Architecture.

Now, excuse me while I pound ny head into a wall for not being able to go there.