Before it became the Abode of Chaos, there was an estate. And before the estate, there were men and women whose stories we did not yet fully know. That matters. Because a place never begins when you become its owner.

It exists before you.

It will continue after you.

Our bodily existence is only the tomographic projection of a multidimensional reality: we merely pass through the 3D plane, while our structure remains fixed within the site’s hyperspace.

That idea may seem obvious today. It was much less so when, at thirty or forty, you still possess the physical energy to believe that everything can be moved, dismantled, welded, rebuilt.

The land quickly corrects that illusion. It teaches you humility.

To understand the estate, you first had to walk. Not look at a plan. Walk. For a long time. Follow a wall. Go around a tree. Observe a change in elevation. Watch where the water runs down.

Where it remains.

Where the sun strikes.

Where dampness settles.

Where the vegetation suddenly changes.

You had to understand why one stone was not exactly aligned with another. Why an opening had been sealed. Why another had probably once existed.

Since childhood, I had learned a rule that would serve me throughout my life: when an anomaly appears, never correct it before you know why it exists. It is a scientific rule.

Observe. Form a hypothesis. Verify. Document. Only then act.

I did not yet know that a quarter of a century later, teams of architects, surveyors, academics, and historians would superimpose plans, cadastral maps, aerial views, and survey campaigns in order to read the estate’s different strata in exactly this way.

In 1999, I was simply looking. But looking for a long time is already a method.

The estate’s very name carried a particular resonance.

The Source. A source is a beginning. But it is also something that comes from below. Water emerges after crossing an invisible geology. I could not have dreamed of a better metaphor.

Everything I had built up to that point already operated according to this principle. Visible data rested on an invisible architecture. A legal decision rested on a history. An auction price rested on provenance, attribution, comparables, and an economic and human context.

The surface has never been enough for me. Here again, I wanted to know what lay underneath. And Domaine de la Source would gradually answer me.

It would not do so in sentences.

It would do so through its resistances.

Through its walls. Its trees. Its circulation paths. Its water. Then through its history.

We were a family in the middle of all this. It matters to say so again because, here too, the legend of the solitary artist distorts reality. Sydney was growing up amid the worksites. For him, the usual boundaries between home, company, studio, and work were becoming almost impossible to draw. He saw the craftspeople come and go.

The machines.

The computers.

Artprice employees.

Journalists.

Artists.

Researchers.

A server could be running a few dozen yards from a sculpture being welded. A family meal could be interrupted by a computing problem, then by a delivery of several tons of steel.

Professional life entered family life. Family life entered the work.

Much later, this would become one of the keys to understanding the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk. But we did not need the word. We were living the thing before conceptualizing it.

I can still see Nadège during this period. She could move from a legal file to a worksite issue, from a computer backup to family organization, then return to a proceeding without ever losing the overall structure.

While I was asking: — What can this place become?

She was asking another question, much more concrete and perhaps even more difficult:

— How are we going to make all of this continue?

Without that second question, the first would have died long ago.

This idea became one of the great lessons of my life. Vision alone is not enough. You have to build the transmission of the vision.

At what point does a house stop being a house?

I do not know. I do not believe there is a precise instant. A first gesture changes a wall. The wall changes the way you see the neighboring room. That room calls for an intervention. The intervention changes the perception of the park. The park transforms the relationship with the architecture. Then one day, without any ceremony announcing it, you realize that you no longer live beside the work.

You live inside it.

That transformation is absolutely fundamental. The Abode of Chaos would never be a museum with a dwelling attached to it. Nor would it be a dwelling decorated by an artist. Life itself would enter the system.

Work.

Meals.

Nights.

Conflicts.

Visitors.

Children.

Servers.

Archives.

Sculptures.

Everything.

This permeability explains why, more than twenty years later, architectural and heritage analyses would be able to demonstrate the indivisibility of the whole.

But before science demonstrated it, we lived it. Little by little, I stopped looking at Domaine de la Source as a succession of surfaces. I began to see relationships.

The trees. The walls. The axes. The passages. The openings. The high points. The circulations. The places where the gaze stops. Those where it escapes.

An inner geography was beginning to form. I placed an intervention. I looked at what it changed. Then another.

I never sought classical symmetry. I was looking for organic coherence.

A tree is not symmetrical. Neither is a root system. A brain even less so. And yet each possesses an extremely rigorous architecture. This distinction between regularity and order would become crucial to understanding the Abode of Chaos.

At ground level, the visitor would one day feel the density, the profusion, sometimes even vertigo. But when the architects and surveyors looked at the whole from the sky, they would discover something else.

Networks.

Repetitions.

Alignments.

Densities.

Breathing spaces.

The 99 Sentinels.

The Containers.

The Vanities.

The Meteorites.

The Initiatory Totems.

The Alchemical Blades.

The Columns of Resistance.

The portraits.

The additions and removals of matter.

They would put plans onto what I had gradually built through perception. This encounter between artistic intuition and scientific demonstration would never cease to fascinate me. I never saw it as proof that I had been right.

That formulation does not interest me. I see something more beautiful.

Two separate disciplines arrive at the same place. One through the body. The other through measurement. The artist with his space. The surveyor with his coordinates. And suddenly they understand that they were describing the same structure.

But that structure could not exist durably without another, invisible memory. We had to know what had been done.

With what material. On what date. By what process. Which paint. Which primer. Which steel. Which exposure. What aging. What restoration.

That second architecture gradually became Nadège’s. Today, when we have to intervene on a work more than twenty years old, sometimes nearly thirty, we can never begin with the question:

How are we going to restore it?

First we have to know what it was. Then understand what it has become.

The sun. Heat waves. Frost. Rain. Deposits from trees. Pollution. Winds. Visitors.

All have worked on it. Time itself has become a medium. That may be the most extraordinary transformation of Domaine de la Source. What I initially considered material to be worked on gradually began to work with me.

Rust transformed the Sentinels.

Trees changed the light.

Pigments aged.

Roots shifted spatial relationships.

The outside world brought its catastrophes, wars, faces, and upheavals.

The work absorbed all of it.

Then it answered.

That was when I understood that Domaine de la Source had definitively become something else.

It had not lost its source. Quite the opposite. The source had shifted.

The source was no longer only the water moving through the ground. It had become the movement of the work itself. Matter generating other matter. A sign producing another sign. An event calling for a new intervention. One memory awakening another.

The place had entered continuous generation. And that is how Chaos truly began to take form.

Not against what had existed before. From it. With those who had lived here several centuries before us: a memory we had no right to erase—the memory of the Protestant Temple.