Gilles Delalex
FLORENCE 2023 AN INTERVIEW WITH
Sarah Joseph:
We see that your firm has been selected to curate the French Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Can you give us any insight on your plans for this and what we can expect to see for this installation? What we proposed to do is a theater. The French Pavilion is a neo-classical building and usually hosts exhibitions. We found that an exhibition, for us, usually looks back into the past. With an installation you want it to look towards the future. Which is the general theme of the Biennale this year: “Architecture as a Laboratory of the Future.” The idea behind the theater is that it tries to recover the notion of Utopia. We are in a world of crisis and there is a strong feeling of crisis with any movement, ecology, economics, gender or whatever. Crisis is everywhere. I think that the main way to deal with it at the moment is urgency and the main way to find it is to act now and look elsewhere at the ideas of different worlds. This is very difficult for anybody today because utopia is the other world we can look at and brings a critical view of our own world and utopia has died in the 20th Century because it was linked to the future. The great utopian political ideas and attempts have died. So we are left with no future today. We don’t know where to look and when we see forward, we see nothing. The future is tomorrow and tomorrow is already the future, but it’s quite short. We thought that we should make a place to reflect on that and not work on a theme where all of the questions are already answered. When you talk about ecology for instance, everyone already knows the answers. Today, we agree that no one asks questions about what we should do. No one wants to raise the questions because they are just too dangerous and so here we are. We aim to create a theater where questions can be raised.
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Back (From Left to Right): Gilles Delalex, Jamie Spangler, Sarah Joseph, Joel Semancik, Madeleine Craven, Julia Stark, Tyler Mahoney, Madeline Fulk
Front (From Left to Right): Aaron Muth, Harris Cheifetz, Gunnar Norberg, Luke Chamberlain, Cassidy Delfine
Aaron Muth:
Yves Moreau explains how your firm has a ‘flat, horizontal way of working where everybody can manage and work on all parts at the same time, rather than having a pyramid system.’ What benefits as a whole do you see from this horizontal system, and inversely, what are the downsides to not having a typical pyramid structure?
Well when we started the office we were three, so we were both vertical and horizontal. I think we quite like the idea of horizontality for the fact that opportunities can come from anywhere or any place. We are not responsible for the whole entirety. However, in architecture you sign the building and you are responsible for it, so there’s a kind of verticality. I guess there is always something vertical and something horizontal. The horizontality is a wish to distribute the work; it’s a condition of emergence of things that we like. The everyday practice requires a lot of authority. There is always a mix of power and weakness, with weakness being the horizontal part and power being the vertical.
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“The horizontality is a wish to distribute the work; it’s a condition of emergence of things that we like. The everyday practice requires a lot of authority because when you are an architect, nobody wants to do it.”
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Holy Mountain (Muoto) Herentals, Belgium.
EXPERIENCE
Photo: Olivier Campagne, ArtefactoryLab
Madeline Fulk:
You seem to have a large interest in public architecture. Beyond it being a space for the public, what does ‘public Architecture’ mean to you and what elements make a public project successful?
We started with mainly public buildings, and have now shifted onto more private commissions because time changes. The strange thing when you make a public building is that your client, somehow, is the public. It’s a ghost. You don’t know what the public is. It is sort of an invisible collective force that is here, it is just potential. You don’t know who you are building it for and you don’t know who is going into it.
You have to imagine sort of a collective thing that is going to define the building. So, we started thinking of what the public was and what makes architecture a public thing. We thought maybe we should not oppose public architecture, like housing to public infrastructure, for instance. Housing can have a certain kind of publicness. There is an objective and a specific quality of publicness. Publicness is something that participates in the life of the city somewhere as a citizen. You put a building in the city and somehow it plays a role in public life. It’s important if it’s here. If it wasn’t here, it would be different. It’s like a character. If the building has that role, then somehow it’s public. Most of the buildings today play no role. Whether they’re here or not, it wouldn’t change anything. The question is not whether it is financed by private money or public money, it really is the vocation of the building and the thought that makes it public or not.
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“It’s a ghost. You don’t know what the public is. It is sort of an invisible collective force that is here, it is just potential.”
23 Dwellings in Paris (Muoto) Paris, France. Photo: Olivier Campagne, ArtefactoryLab
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23 Dwellings in Paris (Muoto) Paris, France. Photo: Olivier Campagne, ArtefactoryLab
For instance, traditionally a stadium in France would be a public place. I don’t think it would be the case in America, in the States. I would say most stadiums are private, but they’re not so different. The difference is not necessarily who pays for it, it’s about the vocation of the building itself. I prefer leaving the question open as to know what the building is exactly.
Madeleine Craven:
I am interested in the way you view public versus private. Seeing how you were more interested in public competitions, but now are focusing more on public work. Is there a reason why you switched and do you see yourself immersing into the public commissions in the future? We switched because the French Government is right wing now more than ever. This means public competitions within France decreased a fair amount, more than half the public competitions are gone. As an office we grew because of the public competitions, they were paid and it helped young teams. When the system changed and new partnerships were made, we started doing buildings that were different. Not only private necessarily, but different configurations and political context. Going back to your question, it is about how public and private connect today. They need each other but the configurations of those buildings are
totally different. There are national traditions as to how the public and private work together. In France, city mayors are elected for five years, maybe more if they are reelected. They have immense power which shapes the context and allows them to decide everything. They can start a competition in those five years, but when the next mayor is reelected they have the power to shut it down. Five years is not enough to make a building. Architecture takes time. This gives us the idea that architecture is shaping itself through different terms. We have projects that have been with us for five to six years and we do not know if they are going to get built, it was more clear before. Now the configuration between public and private has to learn from each other. The private is responsible for the public good and they have to figure out a way to cooperate or share.
Dustin Moore:
I’ve read a lot about how your firm involves not only architecture, but the arts and artistic skills as well. I study architecture, but also art history, so I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts as to how the two connect with each other. How does art fit into our buildings today?
I would say when we started, it was more between art and research. Architecture came later. We’ve tried to work with
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artists who we felt very connected to. That is a new thing that we have been trying to do. It’s a way of letting in other influences. For instance, for the Biennale project we realized that it was easier to find partners who were working initially within the arts, than architecture because we didn’t have a discourse going with it. As I said, when you work with architecture, you need to bring answers and when you work in the arts I think questions are a lot more favored and given more value. That is the connection we are making. I would say the difference between artists and architects is that artists carry the program. Usually you have a book, it’s called the program. The artists wear it on their back. They
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Spring Cleaning (Muoto) at Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, France.
Photo: David Foessel
have a backpack. They have their own program so wherever they go, they would say, “I can do that here.” For us architects, since we are always given the program, we tend to think we don’t need one. I think we do. Since architects are not trained with that thought process, I think it’s nice to work with artists who have an idea of what to do anywhere. They have this capacity not to work with a base.
Jamie Spangler:
In an article you wrote for Pavillon De L’Arsenal you stated, “Architecture only becomes liberating through the way we use it.” You also referred to
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Spring Cleaning (Muoto) at Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, France.
Photo: David Foessel
“Architecture shapes us, but we shape it in return.”
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German philosopher Ludger
Schwarte and his belief that, “we aren’t only the products of our environment or of where we live, we also transform the climate we depend on.” How do you think we influence the architecture around us? Do you believe that our influence on the built world is what liberates it from its confines?
I mention Foucault because he worked on prisons. He developed a theory around architecture as a tool for control, and somehow he was certainly true but not entirely true. Architecture is not just for control, but that has become a tradition, so I am questioning that tradition. That is my question, “can we stop thinking this way?” The answer that was given to it was German philosopher Ludger Schwarte who said it also shaped the environment. Architecture shapes us, but we shape it in return. I was very interested by Schwarte and how he developed his ideas. He worked on architecture as a philosophical concept. He says something about architecture being a device or tool for creating possibilities, things that haven’t been foreseen. You didn’t know it would happen but architecture made it possible. Potential comes from power, your potential to do so. He says that possibility goes way beyond that. It is really interesting because it challenges us to think about buildings that you
see but don’t know how you would use them. Their purpose is not immediately discernible, whereas there are some spaces that leave no ambiguity, and are so clear. Other ones are uncertain, they are ambivalent. Ambivalence in terms of use is quite interesting. I think every building is a small organization, it is a society before it exists. You don’t live the same way on a flat surface as a vertical one. If you stuck people on top of each other, they wouldn’t react the same way if you put them side by side. You decide how people interact. You always give them an environment that is something political. The question is how can this political meaning that comes with architecture, whether we like it or not, remain open? Architecture then becomes the place where this political aspect of life plays itself, the result is not where it starts. Maybe we need more equality. We can start reflecting on how we can arrange or organize ourselves, then architecture has a role.
Tyler Mahoney:
You and your firm worked on the CRV (City of Virtual Reality)
and you explained it as a “Cluster of Activities” as the site features numerous different programs coming together to form a city. With such a big focus on virtual and digital innovation, I was wondering what kind of role architects have in
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IDEOLOGY
this booming world of technology. With popular virtual living spaces like the Facebook MetaVerse becoming more and more popular, do you think architecture has a future in virtual reality and the digital world or do you think the profession will slowly become lost?
Architecture has many different aspects and it depends on how you consider architecture as a discipline, but if you think of architecture as construction, it’s strangely disconnected from this world (the digital world) because architecture is always made by people. I like the strong distinction between the things that architecture can be.
“Architecture has many different aspects and it depends on how you consider architecture as a discipline, but if you think of architecture as construction, it’s strangely disconnected from this world...”
Many years ago, your question was much different as there was such a distinction between the two. I thought it did push towards reinforcing the identity of both, assuming that in the end we are making constructions, but at the time architecture was, and we still are, discovering new tools. We were playing around with a lot of digital tools using parametric stuff. But, then you have to build it. The whole process of design as construction is how you are going to build it. I think this is the tradition in architecture but it has been lost for quite a while because of the discovery of these digital tools but it is slowly starting to come back. The idea is that architecture and the 3D simulation would come together through an imaginary set of images and that is how we created the virtual city. We imagined that the two worlds did overlap and so places that were obviously fiction taken from various media including sci-fi movies were connected to physical construction.
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The Innovation Hall (Muoto) Montpellier, France. Photo: Muoto
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“A detail is a detail.”
Luke Chamberlain:
You’ve stated in the past that in your architecture, “details should ideally play no role.” Can you elaborate upon what you feel makes minimalism such an important aspect of your design? A detail is a detail.
Marco Brizzi:
It’s a perfect quote, just like Mies van der Rohe: “Less is More.”
Yes, he said, “God is in the details.” So sure, details are architecture, but not in every kind of architecture. I mean, there are some very ugly details. The other day I went to quite a very big building in Paris planned by some friends of mine, and there was such a huge mistake - I couldn’t believe it. It’s an indoor stadium. They had to work so hard and the programs had to really work with each other. They didn’t have time to reshuffle everything or to study these two pieces that meet. There’s a moment where a circle and a rectangle come to meet each other and I asked, “What happened here?” And so they said, “Well, we didn’t control that, we didn’t have the time.” And that’s the best part, or probably one of the best parts of the building, because they faced the problem and had to find solutions. That’s the worst detail ever if you think of it as what it should be. As I say to the office, “details are often about hiding the handrail, or roofs, the windows, the texture, the marks, hiding everything, so if you don’t like handrails, roofs, or windows, then just don’t do architecture. You have to accept that it is what it’s made of and that things have a thickness and that there is always a detail, whatever happens.
Gunnar Norberg:
In an interview with Urban Next, you talk about the role of the architect becoming smaller as designers
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The Innovation Hall (Muoto) Montpellier, France. Photo: Maxime Delvaux
begin to work with larger and larger teams. What evidence leads you to this belief? It just happened. Not by choice. It happens that our role is getting smaller. We used to think of cities, ecology and engineering. It is different depending on each country. In the Netherlands or in England, architects may play very different and distinctive roles. One is doing the interior, one is doing the exterior, the other is doing the management. We are losing control of that for sure. I think it would be better to regain more control. I’m not sure how we can do that. I think that architects may have one opportunity. Architects assume that they can play different roles. They could be the client, the firm, the city, and it could be the construction inside. I think that this may be hope. I am optimistic, and we can imagine that our own roles are multiplying potentially. There could be a possibility that as an architect, you don’t necessarily have to be behind a desk or a computer and make plans, which usually is what happens in an office.
“Few of us, architects or artists, can reinforce the ideas of how to build and how to make things happen in a new way.”
The only good thing under such conditions is that we may have the opportunity to diversify our work. We may be more naturally able to conceive a city, a piece of furniture, a book, an installation, or a housing project. If your job is that open then it can be fun. You can find new ways and be asked to come because you’re not just a specialist, but can do all. So if your competence in between such things is good, it means people will ask you to work. Not just because of your know-how, but your intelligence, capacity to have ideas, visions, and make projects. Few of us, architects or artists, can reinforce the ideas of how to build and how to make things happen in a new way. It’s your job. It’s exciting.
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From Left to Right: Gilles Delalex, Jamie Spangler, Sarah Joesph, Joel Semancik, Madeleine Craven
Cassidy Delfine:
You talk about how politics, ecology, and engineering are a part of your practice. In your opinion, how do you design and implement these ideas into your works?
Every angle allows for us to do something different.
Claiming that architects had to go back into considering infrastructure is where things started for us. If you do infrastructure then you do ecology and politics. You’re not exactly designing. It’s somewhere between planning, designing, and construction. It’s between different things. So, that’s one question we asked when we started the
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Magasin 4 (Muoto) Brussels, Belgium.
Photo: Muoto
office, because design was so powerful at the time: “How can we avoid design?” I think at the time we started, a lot of buildings just looked like objects. Rounded buildings for instance, because we had techniques to make round objects quite easily. You would make the model and it would look great. You would make the building big and it would look like sh*t. It’s just not built the same way at all. There are lots of little pieces and materials, and this little thing is not the same when it is bigger. It’s in another world. So we thought we should try to think differently and avoid designing as much as possible.
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Magasin 4 (Muoto) Brussels, Belgium. Photo: Muoto
Payton Anzaldi:
When you created the project of the 34 dwellings, nursery, and emergency shelter, I admired the way you made different focal points to surround each program of the project. The nursery focused on natural light and protection, the emergency center focused on independence and privacy, and the housing focused on views, clarity and compactness. Can you take us through your mindset of how you singled out different points of independence and compactness and how you decided these characteristics were most important? Do you always have focal points to design around when creating or do you take a larger overall idea into projects?
We came in with quite a strong specification on where everything was to be placed. You don’t see this much in the shape of the building, but we really thought about how the building’s internal spaces could allow for this mixed activity to exist. This took years to be built. It was not a complex building but it was a complicated program. The program is the core but it does not have to translate into architecture. It is the same building even though there are three different programs inside. We often work on mixed buildings. It often happens where we have different programs coming together. This can be quite complex due to regulations but it is also a good thing to bring multiple things together.
Julia Stark:
You talk about how one of your main challenges is dealing with both the economical and ecological crisis coming together because there is a lot of contradiction between the two. You state that this narrative is not easy to respond to, but what
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would you say you have found to be steps in the right direction?
We have one way and that’s to try to use less matter, basically. That’s our little thing that we usually repeat. We always try to work with few means, few materials, and it’s an attitude where we tend to reduce the number of things, with intention. For us there’s a clear way to associate that minimum thing. Not minimal, but minimum things as in the least amount. It’s not necessarily just matter, but I think there’s potential in architecture to, you know, when you have few means to reach something that wouldn’t exist otherwise. When suddenly you don’t have enough means, it should be a condition that is recognized as such.
That scarcity of means can be interesting, I would say, both economically and ecologically. It’s interesting when it’s sort of accepted, and it needs to be like a real condition of architecture. In France, the more concrete poured, the less expensive it is. It’s hard to understand, but the materials are so cheap that the more of the same material you put in, the less knowledge you need to study about everything else such as windows. It goes totally against everything we want to do, but ecologics are not so logical.
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“It’s hard to understand, but the materials are so cheap that the more of the same material you put in, the less knowledge you need [...] It goes totally against everything we want to do, but ecologics are not so logical.”
Public Condensor (Muoto) at Paris-Saclay University Campus in Paris, France. Photo: Muoto
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Public Condensor (Muoto) at Paris-Saclay University Campus in Paris, France. Photo: Muoto
Joel Semancik:
I had found and read some of your book Go with the Flow. I understand that it had been released around 20 years ago, but within this book you documented a three month trip throughout Europe. When looking back at the project are you reminded of any specific moments? Despite how long ago it was, I still have memories. I would say that it was an absurd experiment with a friend. We started and it was almost like an exercise. We thought to ourselves, let’s live on the motorway and see what happens. We studied gas stations as places of social interaction. Like normal places. That was the very beginning of digital cameras. Otherwise, if it had been two years before we couldn’t have accomplished this project. It would not have been possible. We were super young, probably your age actually. Photography was still expensive. The digital camera made it cheaper, but we still had to buy the camera and a laptop. We were on the motorway for 3 months and still needed to have the ability to work. We were working on the road. It was a work in progress. I have strong memories of the project, but I wouldn’t do it twice. I think of it now as a connection between photographic and scientific research. I really did the two separate things and they reconnected much later. In the 2G they came back. The photos had already been published but not many people had read the book. It was published in an academic book, not many copies were available.
Molly Zwack:
This semester, our third year architecture studio site, Piazza dei Ciompi, is situated in the heart of Florence’s historic Santa Croce neighborhood. When designing a project surrounded by historic
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“ I think that the one particularity that we have as architects makes us able to travel within any discipline with a specific view, giving a very specific argumentation or description.”
buildings, infrastructure, and culture, do you aim to assimilate your design into the existing context, contrast it, or a mixture of both?
It’s up to you. I don’t know, it will be your choice. Really, I will not give you an answer because I think you should probably study all possibilities. You then can make a very subjective choice and try to explain it objectively. But I will not give you an answer, I will let you work on that and reflect.
Harris Cheifetz:
Seeing as you have a master’s in urban planning and a PHD in arts, which of your degrees do you think opened up your perspective the most and ultimately impacted the way you create and design?
I would say as an architect—since I am one of the few who has completed my masters and doctorate—that I think we may have the interest in things and objects, things built that can be physically touched. We as architects also may be a bit animist. We believe things and places have spirit, it is a strange kind of religion we share. So, I would say that’s the thread, the thing that goes through the different domains. We are able to do anything.
Once a bachelors is completed, architects can go on and master anything. Given, we also often think fictitiously, we not
only think that objects have spirit, but we believe that they are an extension of our mind and our body. We have a very specific connection to things. Whenever someone says something is materialistic, it usually means it is bad, but for us it is good. Material is important. I think that the one particularity that we have as architects makes us able to travel within any discipline with a specific view, giving a very specific argumentation or description. Imagine you’re with students coming from sociology or geography, and you are going to try to describe a bookshelf. As an architect you can describe every detail about the bookshelf, all of the components, and everything that is important and meaningful. Questions arise though: ‘Why should we do that?
Why not do it differently?’ These kinds of questions matter and nobody else shares them. Ultimately, I don’t know if urban planning or art is more important.
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From Left to Right: Harris Cheifetz, Aaron Muth, Professor Marco Brizzi, Gilles Delalex, Jamie Spangler, Sarah Joesph, Joel Semancik, Madeleine Craven
