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

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.