The architecture of Studio Muoto is one that encompasses endless definitions of what architecture should be, but most importantly, of what architecture can become. The scope of work of the Paris-based practice founded in 2003 by Gilles Delalex and Yves Moreau includes projects in the fields of architecture, exhibition design, urban planning, teaching, and research. All of this has led to an architecture of minimal structures that age gracefully, an architecture that evolves and adapts with time, and that is sustainable economically and environmentally.
Architecture can be analyzed in terms of what it allows, and the way it creates possibilities. The way it permits the unexpected, the way it is redefined by its uses and encourages, or not, occupation.
We had the opportunity to talk to Gilles Delalex, one of Studio Muoto’s two associates, prior to his lecture titled Practices of Freedom, a conference presented at the Center for Contemporary Architecture Studies of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through his presentation, the architect defined what freedom in architecture means through their projects, artistic interventions, and historical events, and we discussed more on their approach to architecture and how they work.
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We often look for the way a building or a public space can be occupied and not just appropriated. Filled by a crowd, for example, and then vacated. Then filled again…And it’s probably in this call for an occupation that we situate the idea of freedom.
How did Studio Muoto start? How many of you are working at the practice today?
Studio Muoto was initiated in 2003 when Yves Moreau and I collaborated on our first competition, the European Competition for young architects, which we won. In 2009, we won our first public commission in Paris, which was a mixed housing building, social housing, and a kindergarten. Throughout the intervening years, we engaged in various other projects such as video installations, as subcontractors to others, and after several small activities and different types of works, we established the architecture practice Muoto. We then continued mostly with public commissions in France. The growth of our office was gradual and steady and we currently are a team of approximately 15 people who contribute to the practice.
What are the programs and commissions on which you primarily focus?
We have several different subjects going around in the studio at the moment. We often work on programs related to educational facilities, universities, and schools, therefore, education and teaching is a theme that we study regularly. While housing projects don’t constitute the majority of our built work, it is also a program that we are very much interested in, and in which we focus and destine our research. Additionally, we also undertake studies on technical equipment, particularly in the context of infrastructure projects. Moreover, we have an interest in mixed-use buildings and particularly in addressing the question of how to associate different programs that usually work independently and bring them together in terms of architecture, programming, and technical issues. We often deal with things that haven’t been done before and that requires a certain attention to questions of types and typologies, and this is one of the characteristics of our office.
What does architecture mean to you? What do you believe is the role of architecture today?
Architecture is an activity that is at the center of several other activities. While we were working with installations, videos, and small-scale urban planning and eventually with construction, research, writing papers, and teaching were also activities that happened simultaneously. Therefore, architecture, for me, is a field in which we try to have as many activities as possible around it. The idea of constructing buildings, being in the center of it; but we try not just to make buildings. Society changes quickly and architecture is not as fast, so what is required from architecture is for it to stand in the long term. When we build, we have to imagine something that is going to last for a very long time, probably longer than our own life, and understand that we could start thinking about a certain project that will be built several years later when things can be a lot different.
It is important to consider architecture as an anachronistic discipline, making a conscious effort to slightly step back from the present, in order to gain a certain distance and perspective. The rhythm and pace of architecture differ greatly from the fast-paced times we live in. Architecture should remind us that there are certain things that take a significant amount of time to change and evolve and that there will always be new things in the future. The anachronic aspect of architecture is certainly one of the most important concepts for us at the moment. We know what’s going on today and we can predict a little bit of the near future, but the only thing we are sure of is that things will be different, so it’s important to have that in mind when we design buildings.
The notion that things will inevitably change is something that is reflected in your projects; the idea of leaving the building unfinished gives it the potential to become something else in the future. What is your approach toward this?
While our buildings are not technically unfinished, we like to perceive them as such. We like to work with the idea that functions in a building are not fully decided. Some things require us to be very specific, but some others don’t need to be as fixed. We often try to withdraw architecture from the question of style because it has to remain relevant and make sense in the long term. Thinking this way works for us as we design and it also works for the users, districts, and cities. The idea of the unfinished building came as an aesthetic choice in the first place, in a way, but most of the time it’s about the idea of keeping occupation and uses open.
The internal free spaces of Saclay, for example, are places that are not planned but nevertheless exist and are broadly defined in terms of the crowd that occupies them. They become de-functionalized at the moment of their occupation and subsequently re-functionalized according to the way they are used. The “plasticity” of places lies in that they can be occupied and experience several uses depending on their occupancy.
How do you manage the balance between this freedom of occupation by the users and the programmatic requirements of a building?
We usually design a building around a program, a very precise and heavy brief that clients often bring. In France, the program itself sometimes comes as a book where everything is defined. We try to move beyond that precision and think that even before being built, the program is going to change many times. It’s a philosophy in which architecture creates the program as much as the program creates the architecture because once the building is delivered, it’s going to become something else. There’s another life to it and then maybe another one and so on. Instead of speaking of function, or program, we think of location and of the role of the building in the larger context. Thinking of the building from a distance.
We often work with public commissions and therefore the client is somehow like a “ghost,” someone who you don’t know, and in the end, we don’t know who’s going to live there. There’s a whole tradition in architecture of thinking of the very specific use: the way you sit next to the window, the way you’re going to cook with your family, and the spatial connection between one room and another. I think that when designing we use, in a sense, a projection of ourselves into the life of others. We tend to think not so much of uses but of activity, which is slightly different.
In Saclay, for example, the oversized stair landings become meeting spaces where students arrange to meet before going to the restaurant and form a sort of vertical street. In other words a big, vertical public passage, in the open air, but within the building. There is also the public ground-level passageway that becomes a cycle park because it is equipped with hoops, but also a passage between a piazza to the south and a street. Every time it is occupied, it could be said that this architecture and the crowd that occupies it redefine their respective roles.
Some of your buildings and projects tend to be architecture with a mix of infrastructure. Can you tell us more about how you translate infrastructure into your work?
Infrastructure has been a research subject for us for a very long time. Although there’s no architecture in infrastructure, it is a source of inspiration. Infrastructure has a spatial status now, more anachronic than architecture because it lasts even longer. Modern infrastructure in cities, such as airports and train tracks, are hard to reduce; you can only destroy them and destroy the whole network, so they really are more anachronic than architecture. Those that remain and that are refurbished, expanded, and changed result in quite interesting forms of urban places where we actually live, and they’re usually structures that are not absolutely designed, or where design was not the main focus. That is the concept that we like to extract from the field of infrastructure into our architecture projects.
About your latest contribution to the Venice Biennale with the French Pavilion, what did you want to generate with the performing space in Ball Theater and how did you relate the project to the theme Laboratory of the Future?
The theme of the Biennale raised multiple issues. We chose to deal with the idea of the experience. Laboratory of the Future, interpreting the words of the curator, states that architecture should not be an image anymore, but it should be a place for experience in a rather scientific and social way. She says society invents and reinvents itself within architecture. So architecture is sort of the theater of life, and that’s where things happen, architecture as a laboratory itself.
Ball Theater is not an exhibition but an installation designed to be occupied once a month by an event, a residency. Once a month, this little theater will host artists, researchers, and students who will use it as a place to work, to connect with visitors to the Biennale, and to stage an event. It’s an architecture that we devised as something between a futuristic spaceship and a primitive hut. It is a call for projection, a call to look elsewhere.
We worked on the concept of the future, a time in which we need to project ourselves in the moment or space. With Ball Theater, we tried to imagine a place that would change us and give us new desires, a place that would project us somewhere else. That’s why we chose to do a theater, which in a way is a laboratory to construct other identities, where you can play a role, you can be someone else. You can change your position, and it gives you freedom because there it’s okay to be someone else. The message we wanted to conceive with Ball Theater is that you can act as you wish, and if you haven’t ever wished to act differently, then we hope this sparks a reflection on which role you would play.
Are there any projects, programs, or interests that you haven’t explored yet and wish to study with your architecture?
We’re always eager to explore new programs, it’s always exciting. Currently, we have been designing pieces of furniture for an exhibition, requiring us to adapt and work at a faster pace, which is something new for us and the way we work. We maintain an openness to any new program that comes our way. If there’s a typology to imagine from scratch and something that really has to be invented for a certain user, then it’s interesting because you don’t imagine a new typology every day. The question of imagining a new type in all that may be produced and reinterpreted would be one of the most exciting things that we would be looking for.
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