BORDEAUX – BECOMING LACATON & VASSAL: BORDEAUX SCHOOL

DESCRIPTION – Bordeaux: Becoming Lacaton & Vassal: Bordeaux School

Where it all started…

This visit highlights the work of architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize) through their works, their sources of inspiration and their successors in their hometown.

The Latapie house, built in 1993 in Floirac, launched their career: it immediately placed them in the trend of radical and economical architecture. Their international influence, however, finds its roots in a broader local movement initiated by their master Jacques Hondelatte in the 1980s. His teaching was imbued with the certainty that it was necessary to invent new living spaces, more open and more spacious.

The visit gives access to some of Lacaton and Vassal’s most significant work: the GHI housing blocks, where they showed their talent by renovating in one go more than 500 social housing units on an occupied site. The management sciences university center is another example, which brings together most of their constructed and systemic principles. These two buildings can possibly be visited inside.

But above all, this visit will allow us to understand where they come from with the visit to the works of Jacques Hondelatte still visible in Bordeaux and whose radicalism and economy of means remain emblematic of the positions found in the work of Lacaton and Vassal. It will also allow you to discover the production of local architects nourished by the same influences: the Diversités housing project which floats the border between private and social housing (8 different architects) but also the work of Bordeaux offices such as éo architecture (participatory social housing project ) Christophe Hutin (Grand Parc Party Centre) or Raphaëlle Hondelatte (evolutionary nursery school)…