Re-thinking Housing Models
We acknowledge the tradition of custodianship and law of the Country on which the University of Sydney is located. We pay our respects to those who have cared, and continue to care for, Country.
Session 3
Date: Wednesday 28 April 6.30–8pm AEST
LIVING IN THE CITY: EXEMPLARY SOCIAL AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING DESIGN
Re-thinking Housing Models
Moderator: Kate Goodwin
Speakers: Irénée Scalbert, Sophie Delhay, Christophe Hutin, Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal
KG = Kate Goodwin, IS = Irénée Scalbert, SD = Sophie Delhay, CH = Christophe Hutin, AL = Anne Lacaton, JPV = Jean-Philippe Vassal
5 Abstract
6 Introduction
Kate Goodwin, Professor of Practice, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning
7 Di erence Matters
Irénée Scalbert
18 Housing: A Space of Freedom
Sophie Delhay, Sophie Delhay Architecte
32 The “Hauts Plateaux”
Christophe Hutin, Christophe Hutin Architecture
40 Discussion
All speakers with Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal
46 Bios and Further Reading
Abstract
What role do typologies play in contemporary and historical housing developments? How do typologies respond to new patterns of everyday life and changing expectations in relation to environmental and economic concerns? Session 3 highlighted the ways in which accessibility to a ordable housing, more individualised ways of living and shifting social structures inform housing typologies and design.
Architectural critic and historian Irénée Scalbert introduced the work of the French architect Jean Renaudie and his principle of “Di erence Matters.” For example, the innovative 1970s social housing projects by Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, consisted of an almost endless array of di erent apartment configurations that reflected the individuality of their inhabitants. According to Scalbert, they can also be understood as a counter to and a liberation from the standardised dwellings of modernist housing projects.
Sophie Delhay (Sophie Delhay Architecte) explained how her work develops new typologies that allow for a flexible use of space. Her projects utilise the basic architectural unit of a single room that can be combined in a multiplicity of ways to respond to the di erent needs and requirements of the everyday life of inhabitants. The premise underlying this approach is that the static model of the nuclear family no longer reflects the realities of contemporary life and the multiplicities of human relationships. In Unité(s), her design for a social housing project in Dijon, the basic elements of unprogrammed rooms can be combined, via large, full height sliding doors, to enable inhabitants to configure and reconfigure their apartments and create visual and spatial connections according to their life circumstances. In the second project, LoNA in Nantes (2008)— a design from her previous o ce, Boskop architectes—a room separate from the main apartment was accessible via a small private garden.
Drawing on historical precedents, such as Frei Otto’s Ökohaus project in Berlin Tiergarten, Christophe Hutin presented the two phases of his project Hauts Plateaux in Bègles, France. The premise for the design was to allow inhabitants to live closer to the city and public infrastructure, such as transport and schools, while still being a ordable. The design provided inhabitants with the basic (infra-)structure but allowed for extension and expansion—a house that would grow.
The session highlighted how housing design can provide inhabitants with agency to shape and appropriate space, rather than prescribing specific uses. In the discussion with the audience, Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal and the three speakers further examined the ambivalent role and notion of housing typologies in modern and contemporary architecture and its interrelationship with the social conditions of the inhabitants.
On behalf of The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design & Planning, I would like to welcome you all—those here in person and online, this evening, this morning, this day, wherever it finds you—to this third session in the inaugural Lacaton & Vassal Rothwell Chair Symposium.
For those of us who are here in the recently opened Chau Chak Museum that houses the collection at The University of Sydney, I’ve got a couple of notes. The event is being filmed, as is relatively obvious, and we’ll be going online and recorded very soon. Also, should there be an emergency, the museum sta will safely get us out of here, I’m very pleased to say.
Before I launch into the discussion about living well and living together, I think it’s especially poignant to acknowledge and pay respects to the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation on whose ancestral lands the University is built. As a recently returned Australian looking at this land anew, I’m especially humbled by the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country, and hope we can all aspire to work with, and learn from, the Traditional Owners who have cared for and continue to care for Country.
My name is Kate Goodwin. I’m Professor of Practice at Sydney University and I’m going to be your host for this session. Until last week, I was the Head of Architecture and Heinz Curator of Architecture in London at the Royal Academy of Arts. For the last 17 years, I’ve been working on a program of major exhibitions, publications and activations that stimulate a public discussion about architecture, which I think is so central, which is also the spirit of this Symposium that we are joined here today.
Lacaton & Vassal have been curating this three-day symposium. We are halfway through in this third session, which focuses on exemplary social and a ordable housing design—something that, as they say, citizens have the right to expect in everyday life, and something that we want to celebrate and highlight the great examples. However, they equally acknowledge the scale and complexity of the challenges that face this and that, by linking Europe and Australia, Paris and Sydney, we can learn what happens in each of these situations and come together to discuss shared questions and, hopefully, to uncover solutions.
One of these questions for us tonight, is to ask what new typologies might o er in rethinking social housing so it adds to the quality of life of citizens and contributes to our cities. In some ways it’s both a celebration of cities and the metropolis, the sort of innovation—the excitement, the inspiration and advancement that happens in these dense urban environments—but also the complexity that comes with its inevitable challenges. In addition, as they say, by prioritising the enrichment of human life, which is central to this idea—it’s about life. It’s not just about surviving, it’s about thriving—and asking questions about how to live well.
Lacaton & Vassal who, as you know, are the very recent winners of the Pritzker Prize, celebrate and champion the transformation of what we already have—the buildings, the infrastructure, the landscape around, the networks—and, in doing so, ask us to look again, to think again, which is what our three speakers tonight will do. We’re here to discuss these di erent housing models, to think about spatial typologies but also about di erent attitudes, di erent modes of practice for the architect, about not accepting the status quo. It’s about changing the discussion. It’s about the extent to which, perhaps, even the language that is used might have an influence. In large measure, it’s about refocusing the discussion in such a way that it puts the people, the inhabitants, at the forefront of the discussion.
We have Irénée Scalbert, who will look at historic examples of housing in Ivry-surSeine by the architects Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie; Sophie Delhay, who’s going to talk about two projects at di erent scales—one she did about 15 years ago in Nantes, another more recently completed in Dijon, which has won the prestigious French Équerre
d’Argent Prize for Housing; and Christophe Hutin, who’s going to talk about two projects across two di erent phases. I’m also delighted to say that we’ll be joined in the panel by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal.
I think a number of strands will run through all three of these presentations: architects rethinking their role, what taking agency in practice means—not just designing buildings, but designing systems, approaches, occupations—and thinking about what their skills as spatial practitioners bring to this discussion. I think there’s quite a strong conversation here about ethics of practice and where you place emphasis and what you stand for as a practice. A strong thread that comes out is the importance of the relationship with a good client and thinking about a bottom-up rather than top-down mentality
I’m going to introduce our first speaker, Irénée Scalbert, an eminent architecture critic and historian who trained himself as an architect and is based in London. He has taught for many years at the Architectural Association, where he has been incredibly influential, and, after a pause, has returned to teaching, I’m very pleased to say—I know everyone in London is delighted about it. He also taught at the Harvard GSD, at the Politecnico in Milan, and is the author of A Right to Di erence: The Architecture of Jean Renaudie (published in 2004), Never Modern, on the work of 6a Architects (published in 2013), and a more recent series of essays called A Real Living: Contact with the Things Themselves, which talks about what it is to be in buildings. Irénée, over to you.
IS
I will start with this controversial document, the Charter of Athens, which some of you may know. It so happens that it is a document which I very much admire. It is what I would regard as a charter of urban rights. In fact, the writing of this charter was contemporary with the charter of human rights, which was eventually enshrined at the United Nations. The legacy of the Charter of Athens is most problematic in relation to what the French call the grands ensembles, which translates into English as “mass housing.” These housing projects became emblematic of modern urbanism. An example is the 7,000 dwellings that have been built near Metz, in the east of France. Many of these projects were designed by the most renowned architects of the time including, for instance, Marcel Lods and Jean Dubuisson, who actually did that very large estate, and Fernand Pouillon, who has recently become well known again.
Some of these estates remain much the same as they were after completion. Among these are 2,600 dwellings of the Résidence du Parc by Fernand Pouillon and the 1,500 dwellings of the Grandes Terres by Marcel Lods.1 Here is a photograph taken at the time and a more recent photograph, which I took a few months ago (fig. 1). I should say that both of those estates remain as successful today as they were when completed—at least, successful in their own terms. All of these projects subscribed to the pursuit of standards and only included a small number of dwelling types. For instance, the Grandes Terres project included, amazingly, only three di erent apartment types. More than the actual scale of these estates, I think it was the extremely limited choice of apartments on o er that actually led to the critique of modern housing in the 1970s and, eventually, the decline of mass housing.
1 For further images of the project Les Grandes Terres, see also this publication in French based on the study BCA Benoît Carrié Architecture commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, Directorate General for Heritage. https://www.lesgrandesterres.net/ pdf_public/2017_historiquedesGT_ ministereculture.pdf
I have been asked to refer today to the architect Jean Renaudie, whose work I first became interested in in the 1990s (fig. 2). What made his work extraordinary was his unequivocal stand against wholesale repetition. Nothing, in his view, could justify the alignment of housing with the logic of mass production, which he saw as a poisonous legacy of the modern movement. In housing, no less than in politics, nothing could justify the restriction on human individuality by industry. It was logical therefore, from his point of view, to remove the cross walls that were typical of modern housing construction in France and elsewhere. Here you see a project for the reabsorption of slums in the north of Paris on which Renaudie worked. By then, he still used cross walls. Here is a detail of the plan—the cross walls are still there, with some modifications starting to be made.
“In housing, no less than in politics, nothing could justify the restriction on human individuality by industry.”
Irénée Scalbert
2 MVRDV, Berlin Voids, Europan 2 Competition, Berlin, Germany, 1991. First prize. See also https://www. mvrdv.nl/projects/165/berlin-voids.
3 MVRDV, Silodam, Amsterdam, 2003. See also https://www.mvrdv.nl/ projects/163/silodam.
The events that took place in France in May ‘68, which you may be familiar with, were a boost in many ways in French society, notably for the values of solidarity and individualism. Both of those values are really central to the work of Jean Renaudie. Cross walls seemed to be an obstacle to both those values, and Renaudie felt very strongly that they had to go. Ultimately—and this is one of the main points I wish to make tonight—so too did the notion of ‘type’ in housing. To quote Renaudie, “If you make typical plans, you must then invent typical inhabitants,” which, of course, is not a possibility. Renaudie used to say that he had no idea who the tenants were and, more generally, who the people actually were. To quote him again, “Les gens je ne connais pas”—“I do not know who the people are.” I think this is entirely rational from the point of view of a housing architect, or in most situations: how could an architect know the tenants who move into a building only after that building has been completed? Each human being is essentially di erent, so each dwelling must necessarily also be di erent. This was Renaudie’s position. Here you see the marvellous plan of the first breakthrough in Renaudie’s architecture—the Casanova building in Ivry—completed in 1972 (fig. 3). He argued that not only should the dwellings be di erent but, since each moment, each life situation is unique, each space in the city must necessarily be unique too (fig. 4). The places he admired, such as Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy in France, helped him to confirm this view about the value of the uniqueness of places (fig. 5). Even by the standards of today, his refusal to make exceptions to the uniqueness of everything—every dwelling, every space—and his insistence on systematic di erence still seems radical. To this day, I think there have been very few imitations of his work. This is something which some of us might be interested in discussing later.
Renaudie’s intention found an echo in ideas that also became current in the 1990s. In the Netherlands, architects like MVRDV responded to the liberalisation of the housing market that was taking place in that country at that time. This project was a milestone; in fact, they described it as a manifesto.2 It was a competition entry for a site in Berlin. MVRDV promoted diversity in ways that, in my view, recall the diversity that had been achieved some 20 years before by Jean Renaudie in France. The project description points to the impact of a very well-known German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, whose work is exceedingly interesting from the point of view of housing. The text by MVRDV refers to “dwelling careers,” by which they mean one’s movement over a lifetime from one dwelling to another. The expression “dwelling careers” comes directly from the work of Ulrich Beck. It refers to a desire for choice as one moves from home to home. In hindsight, the extreme character of the dwellings, which you see in this section, seems to have more to do with polemics than it did with sociology. It is reflected in the arbitrariness of the 34 types made available in the project—limited editions, so to speak. Those di erent types of dwellings were given names like snake house, cactus house, leapfrog house and many others to reflect, I think, the arbitrariness of their design.
The approach in this project was very much the same at Silodam, a project which MVRDV completed in the early 2000s.3 This project includes 20 di erent types, and the same arbitrariness is evident in the design of this block. The lead architect, a partner at MVRDV, Nathalie de Vries, describes this project as “a museum of housing types.” The implication, I think, is clear in this detailed plan of the four-storey block. The idea of type is one, in their view, that clearly belongs in the past. It has been made obsolete by individualisation, the term that was invented by Ulrich Beck, and also by the disappearance of traditional social classes. Therefore, only di erences in the spatial quality of dwellings actually matter.
In my view, individualisation is here to stay. We are not going to go backwards in these social trends. To illustrate this, here I include a marvellous drawing of the city of New York by Saul Steinberg. To my mind, it is really hard to see how the genie of individualisation could be put back in the bottle. In turn, I also think it is reasonable to expect that individualisation will be reflected in the form of our buildings and in the spaces of our city.
“He argued that not only should the dwellings be different but, since each moment, each life situation is unique, each space in the city must necessarily be unique too”
Irénée Scalbert
“The idea of type is one, in their view, that clearly belongs in the past.”
Irénée Scalbert
I should emphasise that I do not see this as an invitation to imitate the work of Renaudie. In fact, I think that the design procedure used by Jean Renaudie can appear at times systematic and even obsessive. What you see on the screen is a plan by Jean Renaudie for a new town in the south of France, a place called Vitrolles (fig. 6). This was not actually built, but you can get a sense of what I mean by obsessiveness. Paradoxically, in an architecture that cultivates di erence in all things, I think that what appears especially successful in his work is the underlying principle and the way it manifests itself in a few constants (fig. 7–9).
Here you see the plans of six apartments from one of the buildings at Ivry-sur-Seine at the edge of Paris, which illustrate this point (fig. 10). Most apartments in these blocks are duplexes—so this is one form of permanence. The layouts of all those apartments are functionally non-prescriptive, so, any aspect of everyday life is allowed to take place anywhere in the plan. This is an approach to housing which has been gaining traction in recent years. Also, all apartments have multiple orientations which is a significant advance after the standard east-west orientation of most modern housing. Last, all those apartments have at least one planted terrace, and usually more than one (fig. 11). It is worth pointing out that there is actually no contradiction between insisting, on the one hand, on the value of di erence and, on the other, searching for guiding principles in the design of housing. To my mind this is a very important point and I think it needs emphasising because it seems at first sight contradictory.
Future inhabitants in any housing project are, by definition, unknown, as Renaudie kept emphasising. Architects must always make assumptions about for whom or, rather, how a dwelling should be designed. In other words, they must generalise, they must search for universals in the field of housing. This brings us back to my very first slide, to the Charter of Athens and its universalist aspirations—just as the charter of human rights has universalist aspirations.
Renaudie’s response to this di culty was to say that he was ultimately designing for himself. The design of an apartment was complete, in his view, when he himself was willing to live inside. When Renaudie designs a flat as if it were for himself, he also designs it for others.
“any aspect of everyday life is allowed to take place anywhere in the plan.”
Irénée ScalbertFigure 11. Jean Renaudie, Givors, France, 1974. Photograph by Irénée Scalbert.
4 Irénée Scalbert kindly contributed additional photographs of Renaudie’s work to this publication, some of which were not shown at the symposium. Occasionally, the original symposium images were replaced.
His moral point is that what is good for others should also be good for oneself. Renaudie was very much true to his words and always lived in the housing blocks that he designed.
In recent years, it has been assumed that—all human beings being equal—all di erences are equivalent. For instance, there is no suggestion that some of the plans at Silodam, the MVRDV project I showed earlier, are better than others. I do not see it this way. I think this is a mistaken assumption. Di erences may be infinite in number, but this does not make them arbitrary. Here is a wonderful plan of the upper floor of the Jeanne Hachette building in Ivry-sur-Seine in the south of Paris completed by Jean Renaudie in 1974 (fig. 12). If you look from this floor here, this is the view you get from this large housing complex (fig. 13).
Clearly, in my view, some di erences are more valuable than others, and it is here that the role of the architect assumes its full significance. Architects do not just create any di erence but, hopefully, the best possible di erences in a given situation. To conclude, I would say that di erence and the manner in which it is inscribed in a particular situation is at the heart of design. Or, perhaps, even more strongly, one might say that it is the heart of design. Thank you very much for your attention.4
“difference and the manner in which it is inscribed in a particular situation is at the heart of design. Or, perhaps, even more strongly, one might say that it is the heart of design.”
Irénée ScalbertFigure 13. Jean Renaudie, JeanneHachette building, view from roof, Ivry-sur-Seine, 1975. Photograph by Irénée Scalbert.
Sophie Delhay
Housing: A Space of Freedom
Thank you for inviting me. I’m going to talk to you about housing at a time when the world is changing very fast and when, paradoxically, the construction of housing design no longer evolves so quickly. In fact, this is due to standards, to building circumstances, but also to the conventional vision of the programs that we receive as architects. In France, we work with very modest conditions and small areas, and every decade the areas and budgets decrease. Yet, the programs are still based on a single, outdated family model and standard multipliers.
The standard obliges us to adapt housing to, for example, thermal problems, disabilities and many other things that are very important but which, ultimately, produce housing that is poorly suited to daily life at home—to the pleasure of being alone or together, the possibility of inviting one’s own inner world and one’s own links with others, and the pleasure in linking the interior and exterior spaces.
In talking about housing design, I will, naturally, first of all talk about the inhabitants and the society. What you see here are two major changes. First, as you know, there are more and more of us on earth and, to preserve the land, density is an obligation, a sort of new condition.5 So, the question could be: how can we live together on this earth? How can density become an opportunity for new communities—for communities of neighbours, of course, but also for communities within the house—in fact, for communities at all scales? Secondly, society is becoming atomised, individualised. We are moving away from what we might call a conventional household with mother, father and children to more diverse models.
5 Slide depicts a visualisation of different constellations of inhabitants associated with different periods from Riken Yamamoto, Local Community Area (theoretical project), Japan, 2012. “1960: Principle ‘one house = one family.’ The model advocated by the Japanese government is based on the single-family house. Persons per household in Tokyo: 4.0. Proportion of over 65-year-olds: 10%. 2011: The principle ‘one house = one family has become dysfunctional. Persons per household in Tokyo: 2.0. Proportion of people over 65: 23%.
6 Slide shows a diagrammatic sketch by Andrea Branzi depicting a house with mostly human faces (and a dog) distributed within and beyond the contours of the house indicating more complex relationships and architectural formations. Andrea Branzi, Genetic Tales
7 Slide shows two photographs, one for each project, including some data. First project: Sophie Delhay Architecte, Résidence La Quadrata, Grand Dijon Habitat, 2019. Units: dwellings: 40; shared space: 1; inhabitants: 114. Density: inhabitants/hectare: 440; dwellings/ hectare: 160. Second project: boskop, ZAC Bottière Chênaie, 55 logements expérimentaux à Nantes, 2008.
We could say, this is a pity, but new solidarities, new links, and other agglomerations are forming quite freely.6 This is good news. Today, couples come and go and create new forms of homes, less hierarchical, more complex, with each other’s children and each living independently, and with generations that have multiplied from three to five. We can live together in di erent combinations—students, older people or between generations. Teleworking and digital tools bring the public sphere into the private one—for example, here I can do a public lecture from Paris.
In my o ce we’re working on these issues in di erent ways. I have chosen to show you two projects that propose dwellings composed of unassigned, unprogrammed spaces.7 These projects look like quite rigid projects but, in fact, they are quite flexible. These are social housing units, which are intended for renting. Therefore, the situation in which we as architects find ourselves is complicated, since we do not meet the inhabitants and they cannot intervene in their housing. We are working on a typology that tries to o er a maximum of freedom to the future inhabitants, so that they can each project themselves quite freely into their housing. We therefore try to de-standardise the program of our clients, to take a step away from typologies. Both projects are propositions where density is turned to equality to bring people together.
The first project is for 40 social housing units in Dijon. In fact, it’s not a project of 40 dwellings, but a project of 240 rooms (fig. 14). Within the budget of the operation, we managed to reserve about 10 rooms as a large common room for all the inhabitants. On the one hand we’ve done a sort of atomisation of the program. On the other hand, we had a strategy of never using the words “housing” or “dwelling” during our discussions with the clients because we wanted to get them, and us too, out of our habits and to look for new horizons for the quality of housing design.
We worked and discussed with them on two scales: the small scale, the room of the dwelling, which is a question of intimacy—it’s what you see here—and the urban room, which is a question of sharing and of the city (fig. 15). We thought it was a good way to design housing that was in tension between the small and the large scale. In fact, the room has become our tool to dialogue with the clients and to work.
Here you can see a dwelling broken down into equal rooms.7 Except for the kitchen and for the bathroom, which are half-fixed, half-room, each room is unprogrammed
and one of them is outside—it’s a loggia or a terrace. The dwellings are therefore a sort of collection of identical rooms, and the inhabitants organise them as they wish. These rooms are connected or disconnected by large sliding doors, which allows the creation of double rooms for the living room, for example (fig. 16–17). It also allows everyone to choose freely, whether to be alone or together. The exterior rooms with the kitchen, which is naturally lit and ventilated with its pass-through window and the terraces. For example, if you choose two rooms as the two bedrooms, you still have two rooms for the living room. Depending on the place you choose for the rooms, you can choose to free up views across the room, for example, or diagonally, or around the exterior one. Here are the three spatial configurations. Throughout the day, the space can evolve according to the people who are there, according to the use of the spaces. Each room is a kind of small individual living room but can also open up into a large common area. It’s also possible to live di erently, of course, with shared flats or co-working, for example. Sometimes, one of the rooms can have its own access—for a small o ce, for example.
All the dwellings are di erent (fig. 18). Some of them are strange, because one room is detached. For example, in this type, one room is detached from the principal parts of the dwelling. You will find this proposition in the other project I will present.
All the dwellings are di erent and are arranged in a repetitive structure (fig. 19). But it’s not a repetitive project, because each room has its own quality, its solar orientation, its view or its relation to the other rooms of the dwelling. To vary the pleasures, we have created two types of windows. These are inhabited windows, where everyone can extract themselves from their home and connect directly with the outside world (fig. 20). The storage units are placed against the façade, and this forms a kind of hiding place. Here, intimacy is not at the back of the house—it’s like in a cave—but intimacy is projected onto the front. On the garden side it’s a bench where one can dream. We designed the façade from the inside. From the street side, it’s an alcove with a curtain that allows me to extract myself completely. I can enter into this space, close the curtain and be alone in the streets, but from home. It’s kind of a strong relationship between oneself and the world. I like this direct connection between the intimate and the public, the little and the larger scale without the intermediate threshold of the community interfering (fig. 21). This is a contemporary condition. Riken Yamamoto says it better in Cell City in this little design.
Here is a building; it’s a kind of a big step, because it is situated between small houses and future [inaudible] building, and the urban situation is a non-mixed area, quite sad in fact (fig. 22). We proposed to lay out the shared space on the boulevard side and to make it accessible to the whole neighbourhood by creating a neighbourhood association. The urban planner had initially proposed to make a sort of collective building on the street and houses at the bottom of the garden. I confess that I have a little trouble with the split between the two categories, where one would be privileged and not the other. The building integrates in a unique envelope individual, grouped and collective access, a way to live di erently together. This is the garden side and the future street side; and on the boulevard side, the shared spaces are perched in the treetops.
The other project is 55 dwellings in Nantes (fig. 23). The project is the first project I made with my previous o ce, boskop. We proposed a sort of flat collective building, so that everyone would have an individual garden and could live like in a house. This project, with its 120 dwellings per hectare, is comparable to a block of flats with a collective garden. The site is located between pavilion houses and a park. We divided the site into equal strips alternating between construction and gardens (fig. 24a). In blue, you can see 55 houses and the density (fig. 24b). In pink, it is more like a collective. What is special in this project is that the garden does not separate us from the others; rather, it’s a sort of connector. It’s what makes the density of the project. The dwellings are a collection of identical rooms, like in the other project, and they’re programmed. One of them is detached and placed on the other side of the garden (fig. 25). The garden, finally, is one of the pieces of the collection. So, you don’t live in one building, but mainly in one building and a bit in another one, and there is a kind of elsewhere at home, for the teenager, for instance. In fact, in this way everybody already lives in the whole block. Ten strips of a building are divided into five pairs, as you see here (fig. 26).
The dwelling is located on either side of their private garden. These are intimate gardens because none of the neighbours’ windows overlook your garden. Between these pairs there are public streets that allow you to cross the block from the little houses to the public park. As such, the block is porous. Between other pairs you find common gardens for dwellings; people don’t go home through this shared garden, but through the private ones. You only go in the shared one if you want to be with others. In fact, we seek to use density for its ability to bring people together and look for ways in which they can share their common territory. We want to make sure that the building is not just a sort of multiplication of dwellings without any elements other than walls and fences. For us it’s important to protect the intimacy of each person, but on the condition that it allows an opening to the other. Each flat has contact with an intimate garden, a common garden and a public space. Each exterior is a connection and a separation—this is what makes the density of the project and quality of life. This garden connects neighbours, who might never meet, in fact,
Translation: The organisation of rooms forms an intimate garden. One of the rooms is located on the other side of the garden.
Re-thinking Housing Models
because they don’t take the same route to their home. So, from one neighbour to the next, everyone knows each other. This operation has been going for 10 years and there is an incredible atmosphere, because the doors of the intimate gardens are always open in summer (fig. 27). In France, it’s something very rare—a sort of trust between the inhabitants appeared over time. When a project is delivered, we go back to the site a few years later and meet the inhabitants (fig. 28). Each project we visit is an opportunity to learn from what has been done and imagine other devices.
This is an intimate garden between the two rooms, and this is the room on the other side of the garden. I will tell you a story. One day, I was visiting the project and I asked a single father what he had done with that room, which is detached on the other side of the garden. He answered, the living room. I was surprised, and I asked him why. He said: “I have my daughter every other weekend, which is very little. I’m torn between the idea of going out and going to the movies or restaurants with her, because being a father also means living together. So, we moved the living room to the other side of the garden, so we can go out together, but at home.” Something absolutely unexpected for architects.
To conclude, and by way of comparison, these two projects have comparable densities of 120 to 160 dwellings per hectare, which are quite high urban densities. But each one develops very di erent qualities of intimacy, of sharing, as well as very di erent urban forms. The second project shows us a sort of united urban form. We can’t imagine it, if we think about it from the big scale. It results from a reflection on an even smaller scale than the dwelling, from intimate spaces. I mean that we can think about densifying the city from its smallest scale, from a kind of domestic dimension, and propose a large palette of ways of life and, depending on the context, a point of view of the city, which would be a view from the inside like a sort of domestic city.
Thank you.
KG
Thank you very much, Sophie. Our final speaker is Christophe Hutin, who’s an architect and researcher from Bordeaux, where his practice is. Over many years, he has also documented and studied the townships in South Africa, which has very much informed and driven some of his interest in housing and environmental and economic development. His name will no doubt be familiar to you as one of the co-architects, with Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot, of the Grand Parc housing in Bordeaux that won the 2019 Mies van der Rohe prize. Christophe is also the curator of the French pavilion in this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which is in the process of installation. So very kindly, he is coming to us from Venice—over to you Christophe.
Christophe Hutin
The “Hauts Plateaux”
9 The accompanying slide reads: “The ‘Hauts Plateaux.’ Christophe Hutin Architect. Alternative to the suburban model, limiting the urban sprawl; innovative constructive system dedicated to affordable housing; promote density through quality of life; support social mixity and biodiversity; give back architecture to the people, a freedom process.”
CH
Good morning, thank you for inviting me. Thank you to the University of Sydney and the School of Architecture and Anne and Jean-Philippe for the invitation. It’s a pleasure to share the work and the ideas with you—tonight for you, and this morning for me.
I’m going to introduce a research and development project I did a few years ago. I’m going to show the two phases of the project: the first one is built and the second one is unbuilt. The name is Hauts Plateaux 9 The goal of this project is to make a structure where the people can freely build their housing.
First, I must explain that, in France, when young people want to get a house to make their home—if you want to get a piece of land to build a house—you have to move far away from the city centre and from the city services, such as transport, schools, etc. The problem is, for people to be able to buy a house, they have to move 30 kilometres or more from the city.
I wanted to try to make the same quality that you can find 30 kilometres away from the city for the same amount of money, to explore how you can live close to services
and the city. For that, you have to reduce the footprint, of course, to save the cost of the land and also to avoid urban sprawl (fig. 31). We tried to work on that structure and also promote density, as well as challenge a little the question of density and quality of life, of housing. Both can work together, and it’s also a way to bring a social mixité to the city and the university.
The last point I want to talk about today is a thought about freedom. My point of view on housing policy is that usually in architecture we go too far in the way we design housing, because sometimes the home and the house don’t work together. A house, for me, is the place where you build your project of life, and the diversity among people doesn’t lend itself to a single standard and general answer to housing. People must have the possibility and the capacity to build and to transform their daily lives and to make architecture more comfortable for them and much more suitable.
These are the two projects I’m presenting (fig. 32). The site is close to a city called Bordeaux, in a suburb of Bordeaux called Bègles. The project was done in partnership with the municipality, and the research centre of a big French brand of concrete helped us with the load and the engineering approach. The building on the left is the first phase. This project was done with a social housing company, not for rental but for sale.
In France, it’s a legal requirement that, before you build social housing, you have to prove that you are achieving a certain level of energy e ciency. So, you have to do the skin of the building, the façade. In the second phase, as you will see, I wanted to go further and let the people build the houses themselves.
There is a story behind this project—I’m not starting from a blank page. It’s a long story about structuralism in the 20th century. The first sketch I’m showing you is from James Wines. He tried to do a "house shelf" and, as you can see, it’s very dense.10 The goal for him, I suppose, was to let the people build themselves in a di erent way. After that, in the 1980s in Berlin, Frei Otto did this building.11 In this project there are 18 houses, and Frei Otto did the concrete structure. It’s a very good example of the meeting between architectural skill and the performance of the inhabitants. Each family built in a di erent way, with di erent spaces and di erent technical approaches.
Here you can see, on the left, Frei Otto discussing with the people how to manage and mix the di erent projects. I met the woman with the green shirt a few years ago. It’s very interesting to see how very precisely it responded to the desire of the people. There is another attempt in Japan, in Osaka.12 It’s also, I think, 18 units and a concrete structure, where you can remove the floor and the interior partitions when people move in. Inside the building, you can completely change the organisation of your housing unit.
This is the first phase of the project Hauts Plateaux (fig. 33) It’s a concrete building—you can see it’s a pyramid—with the [inaudible] between the di erent floors.
At the beginning, our mission was very simple. You have in grey the square metres that you buy, but in reserve you have the potential for an extension and you also have a garden (fig. 34). On each floor, you will find a terrace, a big terrace, where you can extend and change the organisation of the unit. You also have a real garden with 30 centimetres of earth to plant. I’ll show you an example of one unit. To answer the question about typologies, this one is a two-bedroom apartment, and the size is 110 square metres. You can see that you have a garden and also some space in reserve that you can transform. The inside partition is also done by the people themselves.
Here’s an example of the di erent kinds of organisation and the cost of the units on the first floor (fig. 35). It’s just an example. We didn’t provide the plan for the people. The last two storeys are duplex units, because that’s fine on the higher level. On the ground floor, you have very deep and large apartments; as you go higher, they become smaller. It’s not a question of typology and the number of spaces, but a question of depth and size and capacity. Here you can see the garden and the terrace.
The people can also choose the type of soil, where they put the kitchen—they can arrange it as they want, it’s like an improvisation. You can also see that in the middle of the façade there is a column which can be used to make a partition and to divide the space, if they want to make more bedrooms.
You can see the garden and the terrace. This is a few years later, when the people have moved in, the plants are growing, and life and light are entering the building. The life of the people is also growing. The people transform, they change the apartment. Sometimes they call me to ask if it’s okay to change, to make more bedrooms or to transform.
Of course, it’s okay. Usually in architecture we consider that the end of the project is when you finish the construction— we say, okay, the project is over. But, I think, it’s a mistake, because for me, the project starts when you finish the construction. Because making your house is never finished. It’s like the Non Finito of Michelangelo—you have to dream and to desire to make your home and to make your house di erently, every day. That is what people are doing. It’s universal.
This is how the people have organised the interior according to their taste. You can also play this kind of game.13 This one, for example, is on the first floor. You can see that you have a shelter for animals, you’ve got your grass, very clean. People pay a lot of attention to the house. It’s wonderful. This is the starting point. You see the plants are growing very fast and, year after year, everything is growing. Life is coming (fig. 36).
As you can see, on the highest level there is a lot of terrace and reserved space, where the people can continue to build. It was also part of my strategy to make this project more a ordable, because when you provide a terrace, you can sell it at a much lower price than the finished units. This makes it more a ordable.
This is the second phase of the project (fig. 37). I wanted to try to make it similar to Frei Otto’s and other experimental approaches and projects in the past. I wanted to make it work in the French legacy, but it was not simple from a legal perspective. The goal was to use the housing estate’s legal organisation system and to superimpose the plot. The height between two floors is six meters, so you can build a two-story housing unit inside. As you can see in this sketch, you can build in di erent ways. The concrete floor has a very strong capacity, and you can put punctual or linear loads everywhere you want on the structure. You can also divide the structure, so people can buy the size they want.
“the project starts when you finish the construction”
Christophe Hutin13 Slide shows interior photograph of a unit with a pool table.
Discussion
This is just to illustrate what I’m saying (fig. 38). This is the volume. In fact, in this project we were selling volume and not area (fig. 39). The passageway also delivers the entrance to the apartment. It is a public space, and we just provide the floor and the services, the energy, the water, like a street in a housing estate. We were using exactly the same legal system.
The project remained unbuilt because the mayor of the town retired and no longer performed the function of carrying on the project. After that, the project stopped, because in this kind of approach, you have to have municipal or political support to reach that point.
I’m finishing with this picture to show you the marketing images that were done to sell the plot (fig. 40). In fact, the goal was to sell exactly the same amount of the building capacity as 30 kilometres away, as I was saying, and to sell it for the same price. It was around €120,000, which is the price of a plot outside the city, very far away. This plot is in the city, near the tramway, public transport and schools and all the services.
Thank you.
KG
Thank you all. We’re going to be joined by Anne and Jean-Philippe for this discussion. I think there’s a lot of questions and a lot to be had here. I want to invite everyone in the audience here with me tonight, but also online, to send in questions. I’ve got Catherine Lassen, who’s going to filter them through. So, if you are putting them onto the chat, we will hopefully have time for them.
While you think of them, I thought I might just pick up on one question to start o . In some ways, this was something that was quite burning from last night as well. It also takes up on what Christophe said: “the project starts when the construction finishes.” A lot of questions came in last night asking, how did the inhabitants respond? I think, Anne and Jean-Philippe, you spoke a lot about talking to them [the inhabitants] in the early stages and how the building has started to live.
I was interested also in what you were talking about, Sophie, the di erent plans you showed, the room that could be used in so many di erent configurations, and how these inhabitants, the tenants, started to understand the relationship between use and function, what it is to live and the spaces that they were in. Whether that was something that was fixed or whether they started to play with it themselves, whether you were engaged in that conversation, what you’ve thought about.
Christophe, also thinking about what you learned and saw from stage one that then informed the hope to be—maybe soon to be. Irénée also, as to what has happened in the life of these buildings since the 1960s and how they have been used, appropriated by people over time—to talk a little bit about, I guess, the lived experience of these buildings as you now see them.
JPV
I think it’s about freedom. In all the examples that we showed this morning, I think this idea of freedom is really important. Most of the time, we are obliged to work based on the realisation of the essential functions and, for me, one function that is extremely important— freedom—is never included. What is the space that takes into consideration this function of freedom? At this moment, we can see freedom in the additional space in Sophie’s projects, in the capacity that is given by Christophe’s project, in the diversity that we see in Renaudie’s project, and also with these gardens that create other spaces. These o er more freedom than the standard. Because there is more freedom than in the standard, it provides the possibility for the inhabitants to really inhabit and to develop their own creativity. For me, that is what connects all these projects.
AL
If I may add something to continue this discussion. It’s clear that in the three presentations we saw di erent typologies, which are really beyond the standards. Irénée quoted Renaudie, who said something like, “typical types make typical inhabitants.” It’s clear that unique or exceptional typologies make a more interesting space. But, having said that, it’s clear that it doesn’t take into account the creativity and the personality of the people. The lesson that we took from all the transformations and all the existing 1960s buildings that we did—where there are always only a few of the same typologies—it’s that many people have the ability to get rid of the constraint of the typology and can create diversity despite the rigidity of the typology. That’s a great lesson. It’s also our opinion that what finally gives inhabitants freedom to take up this possibility of appropriation, is probably more than the diversity in the typology. It is how to create the conditions of freedom. For us, it’s also much more the issue of extra space, of unprogrammed space, that can create this diversity of occupation and of life.
SD
For my part, I discovered some very interesting things. For example, some inhabitants change the arrangement of the furniture with the seasons. They inhabit the space like this in winter and like that in summer. It’s something that makes a dwelling a very lively dwelling, because of the exterior spaces, too.
CH
I think, as Anne was saying, what is also very important is that usually in architecture, when we work on housing issues, the way we design the inside and the house is very much determinate. The goal of the project I was showing—and what is also very e cient in the work of Anne and Jean-Philippe, which I can sometimes see, when I’m visiting the housing projects that they are doing—is that a lot of things are completely unexpected. Life is going forward di erently than what was planned at the beginning, and sometimes you can be very surprised. As Sophie was also saying, in this project the people are making a lot of transformations. They are the proper experts on housing. It is the people, the inhabitants, it is not the architect. We have to bring back this freedom to the people when we are designing. Maybe we have to design less when we are doing housing, to give more space and more freedom.
“They are the proper experts on housing. It is the people, the inhabitants, it is not the architect.”
Christophe Hutin
And Irénée, how has that played out in Ivry-sur-Seine?
The issue of freedom, I think, has come very much to the front in progressive housing architecture, at least in the West. To my mind, the ideal would be that the fabric of housing itself—I’m using the words, I suppose, very broadly and perhaps metaphorically—would have a certain kind of softness, so that inhabitants can actually interfere with everything the dwelling is made of. I’ll give one very brief example, which is a house in which I am currently living. It has been messed around for the last 150 years in every possible, imaginable way. Coming back to the present and the West, I think the di culty is that we build in materials that are quite rigid. We also tend to use models that persist because of the way the market is organised. So, we have to actually provide the freedom—as Christophe and Anne have said—in supplementary spaces, which are outside the conventional part of the dwelling. To me, that is certainly—okay, it is great—but I wish we could actually take this further to the whole dwelling.
There is a further restriction in the West, which is the way we think of public housing. A public housing tenant inevitably has responsibilities to the next tenants, and is restricted for that reason by some municipalities, so there are certain things that cannot be changed. Freedom is much easier to obtain in private housing, where people can do more or less what they want, at least with the interior of the dwelling. As a result, I think, there are great limitations to that freedom in the West which do not apply elsewhere, for instance, what Christophe has done in Soweto in South Africa. In the photographs behind your heads, the freedom is much more compelling and, in a way, paradoxical, because it is not related to wealth but is something we can all aspire to. Perhaps we are back to the vernacular, to the enormous hold that vernacular architecture continues to exercise in the West, precisely for those kinds of reasons—that is, the freedom that full responsibility for the house in which we live gives us to shape our future.
KG
We have a question coming in online, while everyone here in the audience thinks of some, too.
CL
This is a question from Matt Stack: Australian housing buyers often put the resale value of a house before their own wants. Are French buyers more adventurous? How is market acceptance of these products relative to a typical product?
AL
Christophe, can you reply?
CH
I’m not sure I clearly understood the question, but I will try to answer. As Irénée was also saying, when you give people a response that is not conventional by providing nonconventional units, it’s quite di cult for the market. People are always saying to me: “But it’s di cult to sell after renting it out, because it’s very di erent.” My answer is very simple. When I was a student, I rented an apartment in a historical neighbourhood in my city. When you visit an apartment, what criteria influence your choice? What charms you when you visit an apartment? It’s the di erence of this apartment that charms you. It’s the story of the people before you, who have determined another way of living in this place. You can easily project your own story in this apartment, because it was used before. You can continue that story. What is di erent in an apartment is what charms you. So, there is no problem
“Maybe we have to design less when we are doing housing, to give more space and more freedom.”
Christophe Hutin
in making a non-conventional housing unit. It’s easier to rent and to sell because there’s a story and a quality that you cannot obtain in the standard model.
AL
Yes, but part of the question was, if I understand, the acceptance of the clients to develop those projects, right?
KG
Yes, I think that’s actually an interesting thing to go into. It would be quite interesting to talk about it.
AL
It’s clear that these remain, for now, exceptional experiences. But it’s extremely important that all these experiences can be built and not just remain in a kind of utopia of housing. We can see that, for now, they have not totally infused the world of the clients, but we are starting to have a number of these experiences. In fact, we can also see that the last year radically changed this discussion. The requirement to stay at home during the lockdown highlighted a situation that had existed before—that many people were not well in their dwelling, because it was too restricted. There was not the freedom that we can expect. Of course, after this period, good examples came to the forefront. We can expect that it might change a little in the future, but what is extremely important is not to give up and to push these experiences, because step by step they do o er a kind of corpus of—not new models, because “model” is not the right name—but a good amount of experience.
JPV
Perhaps just to complete. For example, yesterday, we showed the case study house program in the US, which was a social housing program in the 1950s. Now, these villas are extremely expensive. In Berlin, the project by Frei Otto that Christophe showed, was done in a very non-standard way and today the apartments are really expensive. Accordingly, we could say that good architecture never loses its value.
IS
Yes, I think one of the issues we have to face when we design housing in the West or in wealthy countries, is that people might not necessarily be interested in spending so much time changing their house, perhaps because they have a busy life in other ways. In other words, our situation is actually very di erent from the situation of people in, say, Soweto, though I have never been to Soweto. I think in this respect, Sophie’s work is extremely interesting, because it—and perhaps especially the project in Dijon—could be seen as a kind of intermediate solution, where there is an acceptance of the idea of type, which would be very reassuring to developers while, at the same time, there is a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between type and the capacity for inhabitants to actually interpret and change the organisation of their life within this particular type. For me, the big question, as I put it earlier, is whether the proliferation of di erences in the field of housing is doomed to remain marginal in the future, partly for economic reasons, or whether—in which case, type will continue to be the reality of the day—it can actually be generalised and, if so, to what extent. My hunch, I must say, is that ‘type’ for a number of reasons will continue to be the dominant way of procuring housing in the West, for reasons to do with a conservative disposition of various professions and for reasons to do with economy. I’d like to think that I might be wrong, but on the other hand I like Sophie’s work. So, I’m torn.
“The requirement to stay at home during the lockdown highlighted a situation that had existed before— that many people were not well in their dwelling, because it was too restricted.”
Anne Lacaton
“good architecture never loses its value.”
Jean-Philippe Vassal
AL
You have here three examples of architects who don’t think like you [laughing]. We can reverse the principle. It’s also important today to take account of pressure from the inhabitants, which probably was not the same some time ago. Now, the people have expectations. For example, because of the pandemic, many people are leaving their apartments in Paris to go somewhere else. When all these owners have empty dwellings on their hands because these dwellings don’t correspond anymore to the expectations of the inhabitants, probably something will change in their approach to doing housing.
IS
Yes, I think you’re right. The question is, to what extent and how fast this position changed. One of the reasons why I am interested in old building stock is that old building stock is much easier to modify. It’s mass housing that has been done in a certain way in the last, say, 50 years. The streets of London, where I am, are very repetitive and you could say that they are built on the idea of type. You have a certain kind of terrace house all of which, if you look on the outside, are similar. The reality is actually much more complex and much more interesting in that the interiors of the house have been messed around, sometimes to extreme degrees and sometimes—in fact very often—by changing a house into apartments or, occasionally, vice versa. So, there is a type. I must say, the type itself tends to be modified in the course of time. The type itself evolves in the actual house under the pressure of the inhabitants. In other words, inhabitants have a role to play in this, which I think is very significant, in the same way, of course, as providers have a role to play.
KG
Can I pick up on something that Anne pointed out? I think that became very evident in the projects we were looking at. Sophie, you’re going against, as you said, what is the general norm within the planning system in France, as was Christophe, and you’re going against a system that was there. I wondered what the conditions were that enabled each of your projects to be as successful as they were, or to get these new ideas into the forum. Was it the way in which you as architects operated? Was it the kind of relationships you developed? What were the kinds of hurdles you had to overcome and how did you do it?
SD
For my part, in the first project I presented, it was a very nice relationship with the client, with the lord mayor. He accepted our protocols for a method of talking about the dwellings, and he agreed to the participation of the group of managers, who have relationships with the inhabitants. So, we could have very interesting discussions that were really open. It was interesting to think about dwellings that could be di erent—not to be di erent for the sake of being di erent, but to be more in accord with the way of life of the inhabitants. I think the relationship with the client can make a good project. If you don’t have it, it’s more di cult. In those two projects, these are rental dwellings. This created a di culty because in France—I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries—when you rent a dwelling, when you move out, you have to leave the dwelling in the same condition as when you moved in. So, there is no history to draw on to make the sort of charming situation which Christophe talked about. It’s stérile, a sterile sort of quality of limited spaces.
KG
And
Christophe, what do you think was the enabling factor?
CH
Of course, to make an interesting project and to carry out an ambition, you need a good client and good people in front of you. They understand and share with you the idea
“the type itself tends to be modified in the course of time.”
Irénée Scalbert
and the mission you want to develop. It’s not a question of the system, in fact. As you can see, even within the same system for both phase one and phase two of the project I developed, we couldn’t reach the second phase, because the person in charge changed. We were very close to doing it. We had a contract with the company to build, but the person changed and so the project became a di erent project. It was more a fight than a project. So, you need people who understand and share ideas to make a project. This is the most important part. In terms of housing projects, I do have one critique. Sometimes you deal with people who are so-called experts in housing. This is one of the worst things you can find doing a housing project—working with experts—because the inhabitants are the experts, not a profession.
KG
That’s perhaps a very nice way to end. It’s not the architects who know everything. It’s the inhabitants from whom we can learn. I wish we could bring everybody together here. For those of you who weren’t able to join the session earlier today: We had three Melbourne architects talking about really interesting projects as well, who are also pushing the boundaries, sometimes almost acting as clients, putting themselves and their own money forward, creating di erent economic and other structures, thinking about the home as a place with a lot of shared spaces. It makes a really interesting, wonderful combination, actually, the three projects we’ve seen today and the three we saw at lunchtime. You can see them all online. I think this is very much just the start of a discussion that will continue in this symposium and also over the next three years as Anne and Jean-Philippe have their Rothwell Chair here at the University of Sydney. This is very special, thanks to Garry and Susan Rothwell. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a long conversation that will embrace this moment—as you say, Anne—that the pandemic has o ered us as an opportunity to rethink the future.
Thank you very much to our speakers and to those who have come tonight to join us and to those who have joined us online.
“you need people who understand and share ideas to make a project.”
Christophe Hutin
Irénée Scalbert is an architectural critic and historian based in London. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Politecnico in Milan and other universities. He recently returned to the AA School in London where he lectures in the Housing and Urbanism graduate programme.
Further Readings
Irénée Scalbert, A Right to Di erence: The Architect Jean Renaudie (London: Architectural Associations Publications, 2004).
Irénée Scalbert, Never Modern (Zurich: Park Books, 2013).
Irénée Scalbert, A Real Living: Contact with the Things Themselves (Zurich: Park Books, 2018).
Sophie Delhay Architecte strives to go beyond conventional housing models and typologies. Unité(s), a manifesto project of 240 rooms, establishes a dialogue between the large and the small scale. To surpass norms, the project de-assigns and deprograms rooms, allowing a freedom of uses.
Christophe Hutin is an architect and researcher at the Bordeaux National School of Architecture. He studied and documented townships and squatter camps near Johannesburg, published in Learning from Soweto, Construct freely, with Patrice Goulet. His research on housing in South Africa includes urban development in critical sites (informal housing, squat, etc.). In collaboration with Lacaton and Vassal (Grand Parc, Social Housing, Bordeaux, France 2017) he won the European Union prize & Mies van der Rohe prize in 2019. Christophe has been appointed curator of the French pavilion for the 2021 Venice Biennale focused on his project “Communities at Work.”
Transcripts of the 2021 Rothwell Chair Symposium | Lacaton & Vassal
Living in the City: Exemplary Social and A ordable Housing Design
Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning
Transcript Session 3
Re-thinking Housing Models
Edited by Maren Koehler and Catherine Lassen
Rothwell Co-Chairs: Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal
Rothwell Coordinator and Symposium Co-Curator: Catherine Lassen
Architectural Chair Project Manager: Sue Lalor
Design: Adrian Thai
Editorial Assistance: Sophie Lanigan
Copyeditor: Cherry Russell
ISBN: 978-0-6455400-2-4
Lacaton & Vassal and the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning
Rothwell Chair Symposium, April 27–29, 2021
Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney & online
Published by the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, 2023.
Copyright: Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Copyright of the content of individual contributions remains the property of the named speakers (authors). Other than for fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and Copyright Amendment Act 2006, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of the editor, publisher and author/s.
The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce the copyright material in this publication. Every e ort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission. The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning would appreciate notification of errors or omissions that will be corrected in future versions of this publication. Electronic versions of all five session transcripts are available for download: https:// rothwell-chair.sydney.edu.au/events/lacaton-vassal-rothwell-chair-symposium-2021/
We gratefully acknowledge all the named speakers (authors) and Symposium organisers for their contributions to this publication. The Rothwell Chair Symposium and recorded transcripts have been made possible by a gift from Garry and Susan Rothwell, which established the Rothwell Chair in Architectural Design Leadership at the University of Sydney. We wish to thank them for their generosity.
Editorial note
Acknowledging the diverse contributions to the Symposium, which at times varied in style, the editorial process aimed for a readable version, while still capturing the voice of the speaker. The guiding principle in this process of translation from spoken to written word was to make minimal interventions to retain meaning and conversational tone, while ensuring text flow. A final copyediting process and editorial review in consultation with the main speakers of the Symposium resulted in the document at hand. The visual material comprises a selection of images that were presented at the Symposium. Supplementary details, further readings and cross references to the respective parts in the video recording have been added in the notes.
ISBN: 978-0-6455400-2-4