What is so complex about choosing a form is that it’s never fixed, and instead in a perpetual motion of becoming. Paul Klee said: "Nowhere is form finished, completed, concluded. We have to think of it as a genesis, as movement. Its being is to become, and the appearance of a form is nothing but a clever apparition, a dangerous ghost." Hence, the second act of creation in architecture is imagining motion.

This search lies at the heart of our design process, across programs and territories. It is expressed in the housing units in Bègles through a sense of void, in Clichy Batignolles in the very intelligence of a form where the flexibility of usage has been pushed to the maximum.

The housing units built in Bègles, close to Bordeaux, were conceived as a type of residence combining the qualities of a single-family home with collective housing. They run across, stacked in a staggered row and separated from one another by large terraces. The built volumes that delineate the public space at an urban scale are punctuated by empty spaces that constitute a spatial reserve for each housing unit. In this way form has the ability to evolve within its envelope in response to residents’ needs and, thus, to future evolutions of this new piece of the city.

At the Tour Avenir in Lille, it was a question of working within a well-established urbanization project, in Massy we had to start from scratch. In order to strip away the site’s suburban character, the process was reversed, meaning that the project defined where the blocks should be and prompted much thought about the roles of the street, the courtyard, and vegetation. In the style of a bridgehead, these two office buildings are the first elements of the area’s new layout. Their goal is to provide an urban model that lays the groundwork for future urban development.
LAN