In the 1960s and 70s many communal housing complexes were built in France and throughout Europe which, while they managed to relieve the pressing postwar need for housing, present serious shortcomings today. Frédéric Durot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal confront this set of problems from a new angle and propose the radical transformation of such housing in order to adapt it to current lifestyles.
‘Never demolishing, subtracting or replacing things, but always adding, transforming and utilising them’. This is the premise on which the authors’ proposal is based. Proceeding from an analysis of the elements that go to form the housing, in a survey that moves from inside to outside the building, the authors rehabilitate the pleasure of being an occupant on the basis of a precise and delicate attitude that takes all pre-existing factors into account.
The result is the seven projects presented here, some posited as studies and others, the winning schemes of architecture competitions, which are the prolongation of the objectives and ideas developed in the first.
