The astonishing architectural illustrations of Philippe Weisbecker go on show

From 15 January to 1 March 2026, Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris presents the exhibition “Architectures”, dedicated to the drawings, models and architectural studies produced over the past decades by Philippe Weisbecker, an artist known for his delicate, contemplative works rooted in the relationship between form and constructive essence.

Born in Dakar in 1942, trained as an interior designer in Paris and later moving to New York at the end of the 1960s, Weisbecker moved through different worlds before arriving at the essential, measured visual language that defines his work today. After an initial experience in an architectural firm, illustration offered him immediate freedom and international recognition: his work appeared in the pages of The New York Times, Time Magazine and The New Yorker. It was only in the late 1990s, however, that he chose to step away from the circuit of commissions in order to focus entirely on a more personal artistic research—progressively more rarefied and autonomous, and widely appreciated in the United States and Japan.

“Architectures” retraces the uniqueness of Weisbecker’s graphic language through works that reveal the atypical gaze he has brought to architecture, one oriented towards its internal, constitutive tensions. “Exteriors are nothing more than the expression of the interior; impenetrable, they arouse a certain curiosity”. For years, he explains, he sought to faithfully reproduce the buildings that inspired him, until his perspective shifted: “I quickly realised that what really interested me was the skeleton of buildings, their structures, the vectors of force that organise them”.

The large drawing of Notre-Dame de Paris is shown alongside large-format studies and small three-dimensional architectural forms—almost spatial notes—that interact with a recent series of black drawings. The exhibition is therefore not structured around a chronological narrative, but around the desire to generate a unified, graphic and essential architectural landscape, helping to read the works through their structural affinities: a constellation of elementary, linear forms whose beauty derives from an inner sense of utility.

Exhibition: Architectures Where: Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, France Date: January 15, 2026 - March 1, 2026