The French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal are famous for their belief in keeping existing buildings whenever possible, no matter how unpromising or unloved they may be. They follow, in effect, an architectural version of the Hippocratic oath – first, don’t demolish. It’s a message that has never been more pertinent, as it dawns on the construction industry that constant demolition and rebuilding is an environmentally devastating activity. The husband-and-wife team have been putting this idea into practice for decades, in projects such as the renovation of social housing blocks at Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux and the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in Paris, and art centres such as the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
The latest recognition of their achievement is the 2023 Soane medal, awarded by the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London to those who “have furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture”. Keeping the already-there is not, though, their only concern, nor is it to do with sustainability alone. They like to use words such as “generosity”, “kindness” and, above all, “freedom”, which means that they are always looking to find and create spaces additional to those asked for in a brief, “with no utility, no function”, as Vassal puts it, “in which the user will feel the possibility to be inventive for themselves. Because this space has no name, it’s up to you to create what will happen there.”
They seek this liberation both for the inhabitants of their projects and themselves. “We really feel enclosed in a brief,” says Lacaton, “that has so many rules, so many recommendations and impositions, and for us it’s a kind of survival.” They strive against an attitude that “in architecture everything must be quantified… everything should be uniform”. They also want to escape the weight and fixity of construction. “Lightness” is another favourite word.
Their first project together was a house built of straw matting in two days in 1984 on a sand dune outside Niamey in Niger, where Vassal spent five years after graduation, only for the wind to blow it away over the course of two years, as they knew might happen. “That’s life,” says Vassal now. “The place was fantastic,” says Lacaton, “so we took the risk of losing it.” A little later, in the early 1990s, they designed a new family house in their home city of Bordeaux, where they doubled the floor area their clients expected, while staying within a very limited budget. Their secret was to erect a double-height conservatory built like a simple greenhouse, which gave a sense of generosity and freedom to the rest of the house, a two-storey structure with also basic construction. They aimed for luxury of space rather than of material or detail.
Both these projects involved a fondness for adapting humble and disregarded ways of building. “We found we were conditioned by our education as architects,” says Lacaton, “to say that one way of constructing is the right one and the other one is not good. We discovered that we could use any tool, any material, anything if it’s used in an intelligent way.” They also developed the idea of reusing the already-there, as with a seaside house in Gironde, south-west France. which was built among 46 pine trees, along with arbutuses and mimosas, without cutting any down. With the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a 1930s building remodelled as a centre of contemporary art in two phases, in 2001 and 2012, they took pleasure in making only minimal alterations to its damaged interior.
The common theme here is that of the objet trouvé, whether it’s a standard greenhouse design or trees or an old building – the thing that liberates the artist or architect from the pretensions and agonies of authorship. The reuse of old fabric can also, says Vassal, “add an incredible value”. In the case of the seaside house, the architect contributes “perhaps 20% because already you have a fantastic view, you have the nature”. When renovating the Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux, carried out in collaboration with Frédéric Druot Architecture and Christophe Hutin Architecture, keeping the existing saved money, which could be spent instead on additional space. It also protected the networks of friendship and support that had grown up within these housing blocks.
Here, Lacaton and Vassal added an extra layer, containing winter gardens, an intermediate zone between inside and outside that helps to keep the homes warm in winter but can be opened up in summer. It puts into practice their idea that a building’s “relationship with climate should not be one of protection but of change” – that rather than wrapping it with huge amounts of insulation that “create a very uniform atmosphere inside”, you allow residents to manage their environment by opening and closing windows and shutters.
If much of their approach is strikingly different from that of many architects, they share with others in their profession a fascination with spatial effects. We are talking in the house and museum that John Soane built for himself in the early 19th century, an intricate and complex array of small and larger spaces, light and dark, horizontal and vertical. Lacaton and Vassal admire this. They too aim to achieve “a diversity of spaces” within the homes of their housing projects, to enter, for example, into a “narrow dark space” from which you might glimpse “your balcony and the light of the city”, which then opens up into the larger rooms of an apartment.
Where they differ from other architects is in their attitude to control. In the John Soane museum, every detail and experience is minutely managed and directed. Contemporary practitioners often photograph their works unpopulated, at the precise moment between completion and inhabitation, where the perfection of their idea is most immaculate. For Lacaton and Vassal, it’s important to know when to stop, when to leave it to residents to occupy and embellish their homes. They enjoy and photograph the different things that people do to their spaces.
Their way is humane and intelligent. It’s also invaluable. In Britain and elsewhere, there’s a desperate need to create more homes without incurring unacceptable bills for carbon emissions and energy consumption. Reuse is an obvious answer; for example, making redundant office and retail space into housing. Lacaton and Vassal, with their belief in generosity and freedom, show how it can be done.
