geoffrey hillereau

Corinth begins with a simple gesture: carefully dismantling, piece by piece, one of the most emblematic orders of Western architecture—the Corinthian order—much like disassembling a mechanical engine, in order to propose a contemporary version of it.

Vitruvius recounts that the first capital was born from an accident: a basket placed on an acanthus root, covered by a slab whose corners guided the curling of the leaves.

Corinth revisits this fortuitous assembly, but through an entirely engineered logic: what once belonged to chance becomes intention, precision, and millimetric design.

The object oscillates between the vestige of an imaginary temple and a piece for a contemporary interior.

Where the original capital was carved from a single block of marble—a compact, monomaterial mass—Corinth decomposes this form into a multitude of precisely engineered parts. Geoffrey Hillereau overturns the idea formulated by Vitruvius, according to which certain Greek temple ornaments were mineral transpositions of ancient wooden assemblies “petrified” by time and tradition.

Here, the process is reversed: the décor is de-petrified. It abandons the logic of the monolithic block to rediscover a logic of assembly. Ornament is no longer the result of a sculpted mass, but of an assembled system. It is precisely these assembly details—the way aluminum petals are held under tension by a deliberately visible metal structure—that establish a new ornamental grammar, while reactivating the original Corinthian order.