The partners Jean-Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton like to call themselves strategists of the essential. This means that their architectural work aims to address the basic needs of users. And it does so with lightness, delicacy, and friendliness. Also with a breath of the poetic. They believe that the formula of poetry, which seeks maximum meaning with minimum words, ought to be applicable to architecture, where, too, a minimum of elements can give more service. Comfort, pleasure, and spatial abundance need not be the privilege of a few. All this while keeping the means and the construction to what is indispensable. “The idea is to obtain more constructing the minimum, almost not constructing at all,” says Vassal...
[+]