Two architects more defined by what they don’t do than what they do have won the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal of Lacaton and Vassal, the winners of architecture’s most prestigious prize, have built a reputation for doing as little as possible. They live by the maxim “never demolish” and through projects in their native France and abroad have demonstrated that, by understanding and respecting what already exists, it is possible to enrich space and human life with only subtle architectural intervention.
The most extreme example of this approach could be seen when they told a prospective client that nothing but some new gravel was needed to improve a public square in Bordeaux, but the ethos is present in everything they do – from social housing to cultural and academic institutions.
“Good architecture is open – open to life, open to enhance the freedom of anyone, where anyone can do what they need to do,” said Anne Lacaton, on winning the prize. “It should not be demonstrative or imposing, but it must be something familiar, useful and beautiful, with the ability to quietly support the life that will take place within it.”
A typical move of theirs, in working to improve housing, is to add greenhouse-like balconies to existing apartment buildings to improve thermal performance and increase living space.
At La Tour Bois le Prêtre in Paris in 2011, for instance, their firm transformed the experience of living in the 17-story, 96-unit city housing project originally built in the early 1960s via a few simple moves. They increased the interior square footage of every unit through the removal of the original concrete façade, and extended the footprint of the building to form bioclimatic balconies. Once-constrained living rooms now extended into new terraces, with large windows offering new views of the city.
The judges were impressed by the Lacaton and Vassal’s novel approach to sustainability and their commitment to improving lives through architecture.
Latapie House
“Not only have they defined an architectural approach that renews the legacy of modernism, but they have also proposed an adjusted definition of the very profession of architecture,” the jury said in their citation. “The modernist hopes and dreams to improve the lives of many are reinvigorated through their work that responds to the climatic and ecological emergencies of our time, as well as social urgencies, particularly in the realm of urban housing. They accomplish this through a powerful sense of space and materials that creates architecture as strong in its forms as in its convictions, as transparent in its aesthetic as in its ethics.”
Lacaton and Vassal met in the 1970s studying at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux and competed their first project together (a straw hut) in Niger, where Vassal was practising urban planning. They established Lacaton and Vassal in Paris in 1987 and have since completed more than 30 projects throughout Europe and West Africa.
“Our work is about solving constraints and problems, and finding spaces that can create uses, emotions and feelings,” said Vassal.
At the end of this process and all of this effort, there must be lightness and simplicity, when all that has been before was so complex.”
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal are the 49th and 50th Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
In March 2020, Lacaton and Vassal were appointed the inaugural Garry and Susan Rothwell Chair in Architectural Design Leadership at the University of Sydney’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning.
