Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal never demolished a building to build a new one.
French architects, who are based in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil, believe that every structure can be reused, reinvented, reinvented. Now, after 34 years of putting this approach into practice, they have earned the highest honor in their field: the Pritzker Prize.
“Through their ideas, approach to the profession and the resulting buildings,” said the jury in his quote, “they proved that a commitment to a restorative architecture that is both technological, innovative and ecologically responsive can be pursued without nostalgia. “
In a joint telephone interview, Lacaton and Vassal said they had long opposed dropping things.
“There are many demolitions of existing buildings that are not old, that still have a life ahead of them, that are not out of use,” said Lacaton, 65. “We think it is a huge waste of materials. If we look closely, if we look at things with different eyes, there will always be something positive to take from an existing situation. “
Vassal, 67, said that even once they built a building around a forest – always making sure to integrate the natural landscape and preserve the past. “Never demolish, never cut a tree, never remove a row of flowers,” he said. “It takes care of the memory of things that already existed and listens to the people who are there.”
This philosophy is evident in their projects, such as the 2012 expansion of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. By excavating the basement with raw and minimalist materials, the architects transformed what was left of the 1937 World’s Fair into what is considered the largest museum of contemporary art without a collection in Europe.
Likewise, when updating the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre housing project of the 1960s, on the outskirts of Paris, the architects – in collaboration with Frédéric Druot – enlarged the floor tiles to increase the size of the rooms, adding balconies and gardens of Winter.
“Architecture can become more and more about technology, more and more complex, more and more based on regulations, and we try to avoid all of that,” said Vassal, adding that the pair prefers “to work with very simple elements – air, sun – for which we don’t have to pay. “
This housing project was featured in the 2010 exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art “Small Scale, Big Change” and won the award for best architecture from the design magazine Dezeen.
In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman praised it as “a case study in architectural ingenuity and civic rejuvenation.
“It is a challenge for urban innovators as well,” wrote Kimmelman. “Instead of replacing the old tower with an entirely new building, the designers saw what was worthwhile in the existing architecture and added to it.”
Lacaton and Vassal said they emphasize freedom as much as function – leaving spaces undefined, which allows tenants to be creative.
Sometimes they are surprised by the new uses that residents have. When architects expected a greenhouse to be filled with plants, for example, residents used it as a living area with armchairs and tables.
“When we thought it could be a place for nature, it was a place for activities,” said Vassal. “This place could have been used 50 percent of the time and, in fact, is used 90 percent of the time.”
Their projects are not only less expensive and more environmentally sustainable, but also prevent the displacement of residents during construction. In 2017, the architects – with Druot and Christophe Hutin – were able to transform and expand 530 apartments in the Grand Parc district of Bordeaux without requiring residents to leave their homes.
In their public orders, Lacaton and Vassal also deliberately leave the spaces unstructured, so that the residents themselves determine the uses. For a huge six-story cultural center for a regional art collection, FRAC Dunkerque (2013), the architects attached a second hall that mirrored the original, allowing it to be used as an extension of the existing building or as a separate independent building environment .
“It is a place where the most interesting exhibitions finally took place,” said Lacaton of the addition, “where visitors are more relaxed and have a different relationship with the work of art”.
At the Nantes School of Architecture (2014), on the banks of the Loire River, the team created flexible areas of various sizes to be outlined over time.
“The extra space beyond the classroom gives space for many different uses, such as a small ping-pong field for a week or a large workshop or becomes a TV studio, ”said Lacaton. “We have a kind of rule that, when starting the project, our goal would be to design as much extra space as possible.”
“We believe strongly in people,” she continued. “We strongly believe that people have the ability to be creative, as long as they have space for that.”
Vassal added: “If people inside feel good, feel happy, have the possibility to be alone or to look at the clouds, this is the moment that creates architecture”.
Designing affordable housing has always been critical, the architects said, because quality is often sacrificed and results are substandard. Through the use of simple designs and basic materials, they challenged the notion that generous space and limited funds are incompatible.
This is not about value engineering – reducing certain elements to lower the cost of the whole – said the architects. Instead, it’s about what Lacaton described as “an attitude of careful observation”: investigating a place before you run to put your mark on it, exploring what may be working before focusing on what needs to be fixed.
A house can seem “ugly or boring” to some, explained Vassal. But look inside and you will find “a lady who offers you cake and coffee. Behind these rooms, there is life. “
The importance the pair attached to housing was confirmed by the pandemic, the architects said. With people forced to spend most of their time at home, “we see how important it is to think about the conditions of everyday life,” said Lacaton.
In some cases, your impression involves very little intervention. For Léon Aucoc Plaza in 1996, the jury’s quote said, “their approach was simply to carry out the minimum work of replacing the gravel, treating the lemon trees and slightly modifying the traffic, all to grant renewed potential to what already existed”.
The two met in Bordeaux at the School of Architecture in the late 1970s, after which they spent five years working in Niger, in the south of the Sahara. “The desert for us was really like a second school,” said Vassal. It was there that they learned what he called a “poetic approach” – how, with elementary materials like wood and fabric, you can create shade. “It was a very important experience,” he said, “and we still have that in mind.”
Their practice is small – about 10 people, including both. Still, it has completed more than 30 projects across Europe and West Africa, including a multipurpose theater in Lille (2013) and a residential and office building in Geneva (2020).
Architects are inspired by their surroundings, said Lacaton. “The observation of daily life, of existing places, of buildings constructed by others, old or modern, meetings, books.
“This unlimited accumulation of images, emotions and memories are fragments of spaces that we memorize”, he added, “and that we like to assemble, mix, adapt and recompose to design and invent each new project.”
Some architects have a clear signature – you can often recognize a building designed by other Pritzker laureates. But Vassal and Lacaton said that they initially do not care about the final appearance of a project. Instead, they said, they project from the inside out, focusing on the purpose or use of a space; confident that the process will produce a materially satisfactory result.
“We are not looking for an aesthetic,” said Vassal. “This idea that aesthetics is the result of the creative process is not something that we have to think about at the beginning. We think that beauty always happens in the end. “