Luis Fernández-Galiano   In the work of lan, form follows form. As in the line of Gertrude Stein – ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ –, reiteration is a source of identity and emotion. She included the poem with the mythical quote in Geography and Plays, a book published

Alexandre Labasse   There is no architecture without hierarchy. LAN asserts the primacy of form “as the primary creative act on which everything built is based.” What has ensued is remarkable: a consistent corpus of explicit geometries, cubes, cylinders, prisms... These

Amale Andraos   I first encountered LAN in a book, sometime in 2014. The book was the practice’s first monograph, Traces, and as I slowly made my way through its pages, I was struck by the experience of their architectural project. The book itself was an elegant and

Umberto Napolitano   Urban actors are exploring new concepts, methods, and forms of organization to deal with the physical, social, and environmental challenges that our cities currently face. We have thus borne witness to a profusion of calls for tenders, competitions,

LAN Architecture   France   The project is located in a very dense plot, in the heart of La Goutte d’Or, a working-class district in Paris currently under rehabilitation, and which is a reflection of the immigration waves in the capital: first those of rural France, later those

LAN Architecture   France   The renovation of the Fréquel-Fontarabie block is the last phase of the process of refurbishing the Réunion neighborhood. Characterized by ill-assorted constructions and wastelands, the block bears witness to the urban development of these working cl

LAN Architecture   France   The new headquarters of the Italian pharmaceutical group Marchesini is located in Saint-Mesmes, a small commune in the Seine-et-Marne department. Surrounded by farmland, woods, and hills, the site of the over 1,000 m² building slopes down three meter

LAN Architecture   France   The population of the neighborhood of La Chapelle in Paris is as varied as its architecture. Haussmann-era buildings stand next to warehouses and light industry workshops bordering those of the SNCF along the tracks leading into the Gare de l’Est. It

LAN Architecture   France   The building contains the industrial records of the energy company EDF and symbolizes its historical service to, and strong presence in, the Meuse and Haute Marne region. Archives previously kept in the firm’s production centers (nuclear, hydraulic,

LAN Architecture   France   Located between the Émile Fouchard Park of Remembrance, a secondary school, and a contemporary art museum, which occupy two former churches, the gymnasium is inserted into a both formally and functionally heterogeneous context. Being right in the cit

LAN Architecture   Germany   This complex of 33 dwellings is the result of two successive negotiation processes. The first responds to a competition organized by the International Building Exhibition (IBA) of Hamburg in 2008 and is part of an urban development for the Wilhelmsbu

LAN Architecture   France   Se ha enriquecido la vida urbana del distrito incorporando nuevos usos privados, sin renunciar a las ventajas paisajísticas de la organización moderna mediante bloques y torres. 

LAN Architecture   France   The project revolved around the idea of creating a hybrid between ‘the house’ and ‘the apartment.’ The building therefore had to meet the challenge of raising a collective residential block having the same qualities and advantages as a one-family res

LAN Architecture   France   This project for forty apartments, because of its geometry, brings to mind the corner blocks that characterized Paris of the Haussmann era; buildings originally designed as homes for families of the bourgeoisie, but gradually transformed, taking in o

LAN Architecture   France   The project tries to create a city hall that avoids the usual monumental codes of institutional buildings and gives citizens a new civic center. This compact volume is conceived to be not only an administrative center, but also a symbol for the commu

LAN Architecture   France   This building for office and retail spaces occupies the last free lot of phase one of Euralille, the urban project that Rem Koolhaas designed in the 1990s, coinciding with the French high-speed railway line’s arrival in the city, and which started to

LAN Architecture   France   La Marine is an old industrial wasteland at the edge of the boulevard Charles de Gaulle in Colombes, in the Hauts-de-Seine Department. Formerly occupied by the Navy, it is today part of a vast urban development project to revitalize the Petit-Colombe

LAN Architecture   France   In Nanterre, in a diverse urban area composed of houses, housing blocks, and industrial buildings, the Halfway House, or CSL, and the Reintegration and Probation Services Center, or SPIP, have been joined to form a monumental enclosure and a symbol o

LAN Architecture   Lebanon   In a metropolis, towers are the result of an increase in urban density that is pushed to the limit. They are also tied to an expression of power. In Beirut, the unjustified race upwards is totally ill-suited to the city’s urban model. Thus, the const

LAN Architecture   France   The redevelopment of the Brossette site completes the transformation of boulevard Vincent-Gâche, hosting the largest construction site ever opened on the Île de Nantes. Formerly occupied by the warehouses of a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, this

LAN Architecture   France   To rehabilitate something that is already there means acknowledging and retaining its past – both symbolic and material. This inescapable dialogue becomes even more indispensable the greater the building’s aura, and that of the Grand Palais, original

LAN Architecture   France   Occupying the last stretch of open ground in the Étoile development zone, the Saint-Urbain block occupies a particular place in the city of Strasbourg. At once a major link between the downtown and the Neudorf neighborhood, at the regional level it h

LAN Architecture   France   The Strasbourg theater company Le Maillon started out in the Hautepierre neighborhood and moved later to the Wacken site, where a temporary venue was built in 1999, but that since became outdated. From its beginnings Le Maillon sought to bring theate

LAN Architecture   France   Dwellings are the material cities are made of: they feed their memory and their identity, define their form and redefine their density. In this sense, housing projects are the most legible link between architecture and the representative character of