Anne Lacaton, Jean Philippe Vassal
architects, Bordeaux/Paris
arc en rêve centre d’architecture
Exhibition, 24 October 2002 - 19 January 2003
This retrospective exhibition organized by arc en rêve centre d’architecture presents the unique approach of Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal, two Bordeaux architects whose work is now an international reference.
Lacaton and Vassal stand apart thanks to their professional attitude, which has a genuine ethical dimension: it involves resisting the invasion of signs, and creating space that is open to appropriation and where the intervention of the architect withdraws into the background. Their approach explores restrictive parameters and transforms them into the driving force of the project. They optimize all the means at their disposal without preconceived ideas – budget, techniques, materials, the natural environment – with the primary concern of serving the wellbeing of the people who will live in their buildings.
The strength of their language lies in this stubborn quest for precise, non-definitive responses devoid of aesthetic frills. The solutions they propose are often radical, extremely simple, and imbued with enormous generosity.
The Latapie House they designed in 1993 in Floirac, Gironde, and their early work at Grenoble University, were like laboratories for their architectural convictions. The recent completion of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a new venue devoted to contemporary art, is a major project which, like the café at the architecture centre in Vienna and the future social housing project in Mulhouse, are a natural continuation of the work they carry out with uncompromising thoroughness.
The exhibition devoted to the entire corpus of their work – both planned and completed buildings – takes the form of several different screen projections laid out in the main gallery space at arc en rêve centre d’architecture.
Lacaton et Vassal official websit