02: Introduction

Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
02: Introduction
Anne Lacaton
Lacaton and Vassal, Paris
The question of changing practices is very important because it talks about the place
and the role of architects nowadays in society. The challenges of an architect are
changing; to be an architect now is to understand the main contemporary stakes and
to have a position towards them. It is to understand what society expects (or needs)
from architecture and from the architects. Is it only fascinating new forms that
introduce new aesthetics and new materials? Is it the challenge of technological
advances or is it more that society expects architects to also take part in bringing
about a better quality of life and initiating the conditions of quality? In my opinion,
the most important questions for architects now are: How and where do we want to
live? What can we do to improve living conditions in cities? How can we define that
and reformulate the notions of comfort and of quality of life? How can we bring a
more sensitive approach to the questions of sustainability and ecology other than
through technology, regulations or energy saving? How can we introduce, through
sustainability, wider criteria in terms of quality of life, of well-being, of feelings, of the
importance of the people and of the individual attitude towards controlling
consumption?
Another question is how we can continue to look for new ideas, inventions and take
risks in a context which is so regulated and so controlled and where every new
question and every new problem leads to new laws and new regulations.
There is also the importance of the economy and cost as a key to becoming more
ambitious for the project and for quality. We have to deal with these questions and I
will demonstrate how we have addressed these in some of the projects we have
collaborated on in the office.
One of the most important challenges for us is reformulating housing standards.
We begin by questioning the quality of the individual space in the community because
very often when building in the city, it starts from a very large scale and the quality of
the small scale, of the individuals, is lost on the way. It is important for us to think of
large scale urban planning in parallel with the small scale of the individuals; of the city
as an addition of many, many individual spaces.
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The first series of projects is about the question of housing. We are involved with this
because we observe that, in the cities, the quality of housing is becoming more and
more degraded and, in many big cities, the individual space is more and more reduced,
more and more restricted. This is because of the cost and scarcity of the land and the
cost of construction etc. Flats are being built to respond to the demand, but they are
getting smaller and smaller. For example in Paris, the new municipality expects to
build 40,000 flats over the next five years, but in reality if they wanted to respond to
the demand of many families who want housing, there should be 500,000 flats in Paris
and the suburbs. So, in many cities there is a very big effort to build housing, but we
cannot just consider the question of quantity. If we build new housing we must also
introduce the idea that this housing should be better, that it should exceed the
minimum standards.
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If we combine this question of standards with the new requirements for sustainability
there are many, many reasons to reformulate the standards of space and comfort. I
will show you two projects that we were involved in and which I think are significant
in terms of the way we would like to go. The first project is in a city in the east of
France. Mulhouse is well known because it is the most important worker city in
Europe with 1500 small houses for the factory workers. At the time, the standard size
of the housing was 36 square metres for a family. It was already included in the
manifesto of better quality of life regarding the conditions of the people at the time.
In early 2000, when the factory was closed and demolished, five architects were
invited by the managing director of Somco (a social housing management company)
to build a new example of what social housing could be like on the site of the factory.
The commission was very clear: he said every year I am building many, many flats but
I cannot be sure that all these flats totally respect the government standards for social
housing. He said that the family structure has changed so much that the standards do
not correspond any more to any family – not a French family, not a European family,
because many of them are two families, both families with children – no children in
the week, more children at the weekend. Many families coming from Africa have,
sometimes, 15 people in the family because they include the grandfather, the
grandmother, the nephews and so on. He said “As the director of this company we
need to think what we could bring for this new social housing.”
He invited the five architects to answer the question. It is not really the question of
the project which is important; it is what we wanted to introduce into the project. We
took the standards that apply in France – I am sure they are nearly the same
everywhere – for a family of one couple and two children this is about 70 to 80 square
metres in a very narrow apartment with directional rooms. For us this was
insufficient; in order to have good living conditions now you need to be able to do
more than just sleep and eat - you also need to have the possibility of freedom for
each person in the family to have different spaces, not only the structural rooms.
We gave ourselves the challenge of building twice as big as the standards. It meant
that all the apartments should be, as a minimum, 150 square metres. It does not mean
that everything is extended; for example bedrooms or bathrooms becoming 20 square
metres, it means instead that we introduce more space where we think it is necessary.
Very often that it is the living room. If you have 25 square metres for a living room it
is not sufficient – once you have put in the sofa and the table, you cannot move. It
means therefore extending the living rooms for the family and also extending the extra
space that doesn’t have any function to give an idea of freedom, of possibility of
movement. It is very close to the idea of a villa – a villa is specific because it is ground
floor and there is space all around to come out from every room. This idea of a villa
is, for us, very interesting because we think that it corresponds to good conditions of
life. We would like to produce these conditions too in collective housing and not just
for single houses. The project therefore was based on this idea.
The second point that we wanted to work on was this question of saving energy.
Nowadays many requirements need you to add more insulation, to reduce the
windows, the glass, to close more and more from the outside climate as if the climate
was an enemy. We knew we could think differently about the notions of comfort and
sustainability. By including a secondary envelope, a volume around the house which
brings a temperate climate between the outside and interior space, you save on energy
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because you create better conditions, but the double façade, the double skin, which
acts as an insulation, is also large enough to become an additional living space. These
were the two main conditions that we wanted to develop. The third condition was of
course to keep to the budget which was fixed at the beginning; €75,000 for each flat.
We looked for a specific construction system that was very efficient in terms of cost
to build the main volume and the main structure. It is a platform of concrete made
with columns and a concrete slab, built with prefabricated elements. On this platform
we have built three layers of agricultural greenhouses, but with a little bit more detail
for living requirements. We decided that every flat should have a part of the ground
floor and a part of the first floor. We arrived at a division of this land, we used 100
per cent of the capacity for construction of the land and we then divided the block
into 14 apartments with the conditions I have described. All the facades were 90 per
cent glass with special filters for the sun but also for chemical protection through
chemical curtains which are very efficient (illustration 1).
Illustration 1: Social housing in Mulhouse, France (Lacaton & Vassal)
The construction was very, very cheap because the scheme is very dense and we used
the maximum number of catalogue products. Each of the 14 apartments is between
150 and 180 square metres. Every living room is between 45 and 60 square metres
and opens to the intermediate space which is a kind of winter garden. It is at the same
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level so that in some seasons you can extend the size of the living room when you
open the sliding door (illustrations 2 & 3). The bedrooms are a standard size and are
on a different floor.
Illustration 2: The extendable living room, Mulhouse, France (Lacaton & Vassal)
Illustration 3: The winter garden ‘greenhouse’, Mulhouse, France (Lacaton & Vassal)
Greenhouses are very interesting because they offer with a standardized construction
all the systems to control the climate in terms of ventilation and the solar protection.
The chemical curtains are a product designed for insulation but we were determined
to use them as curtains.
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We have produced 14 apartments with different conditions because some apartments
have the living rooms on the ground floor and bedrooms on the first floor, for others
it is the opposite. You can close the windows and you introduce the two climates one inside which is heated to the condition of 19 to 20 degrees - and then the
intermediate space which depends on the climate outside. If it is sunny you
immediately have 20 to 24 degrees in the winter garden so you benefit from the solar
energy in the house. If it is night you close everything, you close the curtains and you
maintain the temperature inside the house.
Very often when you are working on social housing the clients say that they are
produced en masse because they have in mind that every family is similar, but in fact
when you give the families an alternative, something different, you can see (illustration
4) that they have a lot of talent to use it differently and make it their personal living
space. Many residents say they would not like to leave here.
Illustration 4: Personalised living space, Mulhouse, France (Lacaton & Vassal)
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To come back to the practice of an architect, it was not sufficient just to make the
project and create this housing. There were very important questions regarding the
size of the apartments that we had to discuss in advance with the client, the first of
which was the question of the rent. It was important to make sure that the rent would
not increase because we had developed a larger space. After all, the cost of the
construction per flat was not any more expensive than normal housing. That was very
important because if the rent increases, the families cannot afford to live there
anymore. This discussion with the client was very important and was held in the early
phases of the project. He agreed to look carefully at this question and he found a
solution to transgress the rules or the uses, because normally with social housing the
rent is fixed with regard to a standard surface area.
The second point was to deal with the tax service. Taxes are usually increased with
larger apartments, so it was a second discussion by the owner with the tax services to
make sure that they do not count the cost of the taxes in the same way. For an
architect now it is very important to involve yourself in questions that you did not
have to deal with before because all these external questions can change the
conditions of the project or block the development of new ideas or new ways of
working.
The families in Mulhouse do not have so many constraints to use the spaces; it is just
recommended that they do not make holes in concrete. Another interesting thing is
that if the space is large the question of the partition inside is different. For the loft,
where there are no partitions, I asked the clients at the beginning whether they would
agree to try-out having no partitions apart from the toilets and garages and so on.
We could then see together how it works for the families. If they ask for partitions we
will work and propose where to put them. Finally, after four years, no family has
asked to build the partitions, they have dealt with it themselves, by introducing
partitions with books, with plants and so on. So it is very important to introduce new
ideas and for us this question of double space and the question of cost are the key
points because it gives you the freedom to change the standard and to alter the
regulations.
We used very low technology in the housing at Mulhouse - it is very well understood
how the combined possibilities of ventilation, of solar, of the sun, of curtains and so
on are used. We therefore believe very strongly that, in this question of sustainability,
the attitude of the inhabitant should be more enlightened.
The second project is not yet built. It is the idea of high density villas in the city and is
shown in illustration 5. For every apartment in this collective system, we have the
same requirements, the same conditions. The structure is very free of strong elements
like concrete walls. It is made with columns and every floor is 5.50 metres in order to
be able to be an integrated floor and to be a mezzanine. This block contains six
pillars, superimposed. Each pillar – one in each of the four corners and two in the
middle – is between 180 and 200 square metres, with each of them as a large closed
terrace or winter garden as you prefer. There is also a balcony to introduce the
possibility of going outside. There is just one core with two elevators and the core
serves all the apartments. In order to reduce the cost, to extend the individual space,
it is necessary to reduce the impact of the structures, the impact of the circulation and
the collective spaces.
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Illustration 5: Immeuble villas project ( Lacaton & Vassal)
Illustration 6: Immeuble Villa project (Lacaton & Vassal)
The apartment in illustration 6 is in the corner and you can imagine very high
buildings on this principle and maybe mixed use, over offices or retail. For us we
would really like to have the chance to build such a building. It seems to us that it is
an interesting concept in the context of densification of the cities. Densification
becomes a necessity now, in order to limit the expansion of the cities, but at the same
time we know that people have a desire for a private villa If we do not propose these
conditions of living in a dense and collective context to the families it will be very
difficult to make the density acceptable to the inhabitants.
The third point about housing is the question of recycling its modern heritage. In
many countries, the question now is what to do with these huge high rise blocks of
social housing built in the sixties and seventies. Everywhere you go in the world, in
every city, they have built such housing units in the suburbs. The question
everywhere is what to do with them. In France it was decided some years ago to
develop a policy of deconstruction and demolition. After carefully studying this
policy we did not agree with it. Even if there are great problems of education or
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employment, of quality of housing, of lack of facilities in the suburbs, we think that
demolition is the worst solution. We cannot think that the problem is only a problem
of architecture. We think that housing blocks, even in the bad condition they are in
now, are not at the end of their lives and they represent a high potential for
improvement.
Illustration 7: PLUS – Transformation of social housing, Druot, Lacaton & Vassal
In the research that we did from 2004 – which was published in 2007 (illustration 7) –
we took several examples in the suburbs of Paris and London of buildings that we
knew were due for demolition and studied the possibilities in terms of keeping the
building and trying to do a very strong and important improvement of the quality of
living inside.
The question of the cost is very important because in this policy of deconstruction the
government decided to spend on one hand €10,000 to €12,000 to do the
refurbishment or, on the other hand, €150,000 to demolish and then rebuild new
housing – there was nothing in between to make a very important transformation.
The gap is very important.
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We observed that in the same period, (in the sixties), some architects built very good
buildings. They did interesting work on the housing conditions themselves which was
not done in the very large scale housing eras. For example you have a nice entrance
hall for the community, the apartments are very nice, with large openings that give
advantage of the views. These buildings are still a very good standard today and there
is no talk of demolishing them.
We thought that for many buildings it was possible to make simple and positive
transformations, starting from inside, changing room by room, apartment by
apartment, improving the quality of life. We saw that it was not impossible to start
with the existing and improve the quality, using the construction that was done in the
period. If you open the facades when it is possible or add a balcony and large sliding
glazed doors, it becomes totally different and these simple works can be carried out
with the people living inside.
It is work which does not destroy the existing structures, but works with additions.
We worked on several examples to see what was possible and we also studied the cost
very carefully. We could see that to enlarge and improve an apartment the cost is, at
the maximum, €50,000. Compared to the cost of demolishing and rebuilding one
apartment, you can transform three apartments to a very high standard, giving very
good conditions, and giving the possibility to add 20 to 30 square metres.
Illustration 8: Possible solutions for increasing the size and improving the standard of living
These include ideas such as adding roof gardens, opening up the skin and adding
balconies (illustration 8). Starting from this inside improvement of quality, it creates an
immediate transformation of the image of the building. What we propose is not to do
it just by changing the skin, but by a long-term transformation which comes from the
inside (illustration 9).
Illustration 9:Transformation from the inside
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Illustration 10: The Paris housing block before the transformation
To conclude, here are two examples that are now underway after three years of
studies. Illustration 10 is a housing block in Paris before work began. We won the
competition in 2005 and it was part of the development of social housing built in the
seventies in Paris – it is not in the suburbs.
It was a very nice building at the beginning, made by a famous architect, but in the
eighties when they did the first demolitions for saving energy, for insulation, they
totally degraded the internal quality. They introduced this ugly skin, they reduced all
the windows, they closed the loggia and now 20 years later it is necessary to refurbish
them again.
A lesson that we really have to take from this building is that if we are just considering
the refurbishment from a technical aspect it will not be sufficient to improve the
quality of an existing building. It is important to give more, to constantly improve the
living conditions and the quality of life. The project here is to make an additional
space around. It allows us to keep all the apartments without transformation inside,
without a lot of works because it would cost a lot to open the concrete walls, so we
prefer to make an addition around.
The principle of construction of these extensions is totally independent in terms of
structure; it is prefabricated and allows it to be built very fast. We take out the façade
step by step when the modules are built. The interesting thing about this method of
construction is that because you build it outside you can build very fast on the day and
you can keep the families inside during the works.
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Illustration 11: The transformation of the housing block in Paris – currently under construction
(Architects Druot, Lacaton & Vassal)
Illustration 11 shows plans and the renderings of the extension. This scheme shows
the movements of the families inside the block, established after a long period of
discussion with the inhabitants. 50 per cent will stay in the apartments and 50 per cent
will move, either to a larger apartment or to a smaller one.
The works of the transformation will be made with the site occupied. This is very
important now because it would have been quite difficult to find enough free
apartments in the neighbourhood for all 96 families. We made a prototype last year
and, starting from this situation, built in the eighties, we open it up and create this new
loggia and from this limit the apartment can stay exactly as it is because many families
have refurbished inside; they have decorated and they wanted to keep them as they
were. Here too the transformation will be from the inside.
The last example shown in illustration 12 is interesting because it is not a single block;
it is an entire piece of the city. We will start work on just one of the housing blocks
and then move on to the next. The building is in a good state but the apartments are a
little bit small. The construction is very strong and it is impossible to imagine
removing the walls because we do not know exactly how it was built and it would be
very expensive to do.
We took the situation from inside and asked, what is the main problem in each
apartment? The main problem, as all the families say, is first the size of the bathroom
which is less than three square metres. So we started from this point and we decided
to put the bathroom in the smallest bedroom of nine square metres and to build an
addition with bedrooms.
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Illustration 12: Transformation and densification of housing blocks in St Nazaire, France, currently
under construction (Architects Lacaton & Vassal)
We proposed in this case to make two apartments from three existing apartments and
to replace the 30 per cent of apartments that we have taken out from the blocks on
the free surrounding land (illustration 13). We planned to make a connection with the
apartment with a large closed terrace and a balcony. It means that finally the
apartment gets 33 square metres more usable space, a larger bathroom and it is also an
opportunity to introduce disabled access for the flats. If you applied it to every
apartment it became a new building, but because of the situation of this place with a
lot of free space around the blocks, even if the people see it is very dense because
inside the blocks the density is high, the floor is not dense at all because the footprint
of the building is less than 10 per cent. It means that there is 90 per cent of free space
without a lot of quality.
We had the idea that we could also improve the densification around the block to
make better use of the floor inside. If we adapt the situation to the block it means we
could build 40 more apartments, connected to this existing block, and this also allows
the possibility of introducing two new staircases and new lifts.
This apartment will be served now by the lift. The new blocks are built on car
parking. It creates a totally new building of very high quality and 40 new apartments
on a place which is already owned. It creates an urban development with the
transition between the small houses and the high block and then introduces them in a
new urban design that integrates the architecture but also the community. It also
allows the families to stay there, because many families have their roots and they like
to live there. So there was the possibility to stay in the one place.
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Illustration 13: Plans for the scheme in St Nazaire
If we continue this idea on each block, we can reinforce the density around, along the
streets, and keep the green park in the middle. It will be possible to build more than
250 new flats here which means a new population will come, with a new school,
maybe shops, working spaces, etc., and it will become a regenerated district in the city
(illustration 14).
Illustration 14: The transformation, St Naziare, France (Architects: Lacaton & Vassal)
This relationship between better housing conditions and more density is for us a
crucial and very important question in the context of re-thinking the quality and good
conditions of urban life.
This is a new challenge for architects now.
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