Présentation de l'éditeur :
With a professional career of more than twenty years behind them, French architects Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal, to whom we devoted an issue of our magazine 2G
in 2001, continue to pursue their own coherent, personal approach to
architecture. Theirs is a position far removed from formal originality,
being based, instead, on an ethical conception that upholds the
essential idea of the architect’s social responsibility.
Lacaton & Vassal have constructed a discourse of their own that,
although seemingly simple, embraces the complexity of contemporary
reality. The few, carefully chosen issues that interest them are
tantamount, in themselves, to a wish to go beyond paradigms established
by the market. The strategies that shape their work might be summed up
as understanding the real needs of the client without formal
preconceptions, inventing supplementary extra space through intelligent
use of the budget (cost-effectiveness as a planning tool), fomenting
freedom of use on the part of users, endowing buildings with
flexibility, creating controlled climatic environments by means of
technology and simple materials, and the ambition to influence the urban
planning of the city through architectural design.
All these concerns, present from the beginning of their career in all
their projects, whatever the programme or scale, are developed
exhaustively and perseveringly in the projects we present in this number
of our magazine 2G.
Among them, we might point to recently finalized projects like the
transformation of the Bois-le-Prêtre tower block in Paris—a built
example of their investigation into how to act on obsolete blocks of
flats from the 1960s and 70s in France (an investigation we include in
our book Large-scale Housing Developments: An Exceptional Case)—two multi-family housing projects in Saint-Nazaire, and the School of Architecture in Nantes.
In this volume we also present projects on a city scale such as an
urban plan for Dublin, their proposal for the Porte de la Chapelle in
Paris, and the La Vecquerie eco-area in Saint-Nazaire. Other projects
that are representative of their recent trajectory are the scheme for
Holcim Laboratories (Holderbank, Switzerland), the artwork storage
facilities for the Fundação Serralves (Matosinhos, Portugal, and the
building for the Fond Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord-Pas de Calais in
Dunkerque, the completion of which is foreseen for 2013.
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