Lacaton & Vassal

Never demolish. Always add.

‘The house was built on the bank of the River Niger, on one of the area's rare sand dunes, a dune particularly well-ventilated by currents of fresh air, in accordance with the axes of the river up-and downstream from Niamey, one kilometre from the village of Saadia. It was made up of three things: straw matting to provide shelter, the walled enclosure, and the hangar to both receive people in and look out from. Facing Niamey of an evening, the lights of the town were bright enough to get one's bearings. Searching for and deciding upon the site took six months, the building work two days. The wind took two years to destroy it.’

Paillote, Niamey, Niger. Straw matting hut, built in 1984. Lacaton & Vassal.

When students finish their architectural studies, the ones not deeply in hock to their student loans, often go travelling, or do a stint with an NGO in a distant, difficult country, paying back something for their privileged education, or following some idealistic model discovered during that education. After his studies at the AA in 1954, John F C Turner went to work in state housing in Peru, an experience primed by his student readings in Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and which, because of the lessons of squatter housing that he brought into housing policy, informed the rest of his life.

Jean-Phillipe Vassal, after graduating in 1980 from the École nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage de Bordeaux, spent five years in Niger as an architect and town planner. The Lacaton & Vassal website puts the Paillotte project, above, as their first project; it was also the first image in their 2023 Soane Medal lecture given at the end of November in the John Soane House library. As Vassal put it, the lesson was to build with the climate, not against it, and as one can see from all Lacaton & Vassal’s subsequent work, to build in a simple, unadorned, minimal way. For myself, I would put it as working with weak systems that combine to make mutable, flexible buildings: the willow that bends versus the oak that stands strong and is uprooted in the storm.

The second slide in the Sloane Medal lecture was of a large industrial greenhouse. Because these structures are designed for profitable agricultural use, they have highly developed material properties and climate control mechanisms. Built with stock material, simple in form, thy capitalise on climate and weather to provide an environment that hovers, mediates, occupies a liminal space, between inside and outside.

The second project on their website is a 1992 prototype dwelling: Maison d’habitation économique. Now clearly they were doing other kinds of work in the intervening eight years, but building a website for a practice is as much of a project as proposing a built structure. The narrative is designed, shaped, and in doing so, reveals the concepts at the very heart of Lacaton & Vassal’s much awarded and rewarded career.

Maison d'habitation économique Prototype Dwelling, 1992. ‘Erected on a 12mx9m rectangular base, the envelope consists of a standard plastic horticultural greenhouse, 6m high, fixed onto a 2.75m high wall, giving directly onto the street and the party walls. It defines a great, sheltered and closed volume, light-filled and transparent, in which an agreeable temperate climate is created all year round (the Balearic Islands). Inside, two detached and largely openable structures in wood contain the living room, kitchen, bedrooms and a solarium terrace on three levels. The roof and the north and west sides of the greenhouse are made of plastic film with an inflatable and highly insulating double wall. In winter, indoor climate control and comfort is ensured by harnessing solar radiation, and in summer through automated natural ventilation and cloth sunshades, thus enabling high temperatures to be avoided. The building cost, higher than the objective fixed at 55.000 € led us to rethink the project for arriving at the implementation of the definitive house.’

Granted it was for the benign climate of the Balearics, and the cost estimate was more than planned, it still exhibits all the conditions and qualities found in Lacaton & Vassal’s work today.

The 1993 Maison Latapie, in Floirac: ‘The inexpensive house is the result of a commision to build, on a low budget, a house for a couple with two children. Located in a discontinuous residential area, the house fits into the street profile. It's a simple volume on a rectangular base that posits two open platforms. On a metal frame, one half, on the street side, is covered with opaque fibre-cement sheeting, and the other half, on the garden side, with transparent polycarbonate sheeting, forming a conservatory. A wooden volume, clamped into the frame behind the opaque sheeting, defines an insulated and heated winter space opening onto the conservatory and the street-side exterior. The conservatory faces east and gets the early morning sun. It's an inhabitable part of the house, equipped with ample ventilation panels for comfort in summer. The mobile nature of the east and west facades enables the house to change from its most closed to its most open state according to the need and desire for light, transparency, intimacy, protection and ventilation. The inhabitable part of the house can vary according to the seasons, from the smallest (living room and bedrooms) to the largest area, by integrating the entire garden in high summer.’

This house on a small budget, gave Lacaton & Vassal their architectural modus operandi: build simply, build double, build with the existing, never demolish, always add.

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Lacaton & Vassal, Transformation de 530 logements, quartier du Grand Parc, Bordeaux. Before and after, 2015.

Transformation de 530 logements, quartier du Grand Parc, Bordeaux, Avril 2015. all photographs C Philippe Rualt

A large scale demonstration of building simply (read thinking clearly) was three 1960s social housing slabs in the Gran Parc estate in Bordeaux, slated for replacement in an ongoing rethink of social housing on city peripheries throughout France: partly a response to the social and ethnic problems particularly in the banlieus of Paris in the 1990s, and partly because their mid-modernist architecture was, and is still, much disparaged. Lacaton, Vassal and Pierre Druot challenged this initiative with their 2004 manifesto PLUS against wasteful demolition — it is unsustainable, a great loss of embedded energy and results in displacement and dispersal of inhabitants — and for the retention of the buildings, renewing mechanical systems, restoring structures if necessary, increasing the space of each unit and keeping the occupants of each block in place, in their units even through construction, next to their neighbours, in their neighbourhood of shops and transportation, near the schools their children attend.

This before and after drawing from an AJ Building study: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/buildings/building-study-lacaton-vassals-renovation-of-a-bordeaux-housing-estate

Each of the 530 units had a full width 3.8m balcony added to its outside face: the old exterior wall was stripped off, the balconies glassed in with opening windows, sun-reflective curtains to be drawn or pulled back, a double-glazed interface at the unit itself. This, they call free space, unprogrammed, minimally conditioned, simply an enlargement of the existing flat, again a mediation between inside space and the outside environment.

There is a powerful economic reasoning underpinning this: for the Gran Parc 530 units, the cost of demolition and rebuilding new but smaller was €165,000/unit. Keeping and renovating each unit to be larger was €55,000/unit, a massive difference.

Anne Lacaton warns never to look from the outside and find a building ugly, look at people’s lives and collections inside, and start with that. Aesthetics and style are less important than the social intelligence that value comes from people and their lives, and that architecture’s task is to make those lives better.

Before the transformation of 530 apartments, quartier du Grand Parc, Bordeaux. Do not look from the outside and find a building ugly, look at people’s lives and collections inside, for they are beautiful. all photographs C Philippe Rualt; all images here linked to their source websites.

free space

What Lacaton & Vassal call winter gardens occur in some form in all their projects from houses to housing, museums to universities, whether on roofs, or enormous terraces, or in doubled building volumes — unprogrammed space, willing to be appropriated for changing uses as needed or wanted. The advantage in not demolishing something, is that the structure already exists. It may be in rough shape, but that is remediable. It may not be perfect for whatever new functions are needed, but that pushes back on program, forcing it to interact with the past and the material present.

For new buildings and additions, Lacaton & Vassal build a basic concrete frame and platform structure, just as in their 1992 house prototype: the pre-condition for what they call loft space. On, in and around this structure is an environmental bubble, usually industrial greenhousing, mechanically vented, and within that is a basic building (for housing, inevitably following social housing standards) that sits like a piece of furniture in this enveloped loft space. Outside this programmed box is open space, nominally weather protected by the greenhouse system, but generally uninflected, unprogrammed.

These are free spaces, not technologically dependent, rather supplied with analogue opening windows, reflective curtains, shade arbours — things that require interaction to manage the space and its internal climate. Being unprogrammed releases users from conventional uses, from predictability and from the compression of tightly planned buildings. In the Soane lecture Jean-Pierre Vassal says ‘Open a window, draw a blind — don’t think of a building as a machine that does all of that for you. The building is like a body – change the coat according to the weather; change the functions with the seasons’.

It is these interactions that produce a deeply humanist architecture that builds less, observes more; is never cosmetic, nor does it make changes just for the sake of change.