François Roche is a french architect, leader (with architect Stéphanie Lavaux) of Paris based office R&Sie (n). This interview, by architecture student Maria Chiara Di Vincenzo, took place in Paris in June 2009.
How would you describe architecture teaching in western Europe?
Architecture teaching in Italy, France and Spain is mainly subdued to Beaux Arts models, to repetition of types.
The fundamental problem is that is imposed to students an analysis of project that doesn’t expressly concern the understanding of the project itself.
The native idea of the project is often hampered by the detailed study of geometric forms assumed in an abstract context.
In France the fundamental problem of teaching deals with the inability of teachers to stimulate a critical forma mentis in the pupil.
As I said, knowledge is spread through references in relation with what already exists, in a process that foresees the validation of architectures and projects already tested by history.
We could speak of a teaching system which works through the digestion and regularization of references.
This approach hampers the pupil’s ability to become actor of the design process. students’ imagination, research and vivacity is completely hampered. It seems that students have always to bring some references to validate the goodness of a proper project.
An architecture analysis should probably be a narration analysis.
Architecture could be identifiable as the “narration of an idea, of a history.”
Which could be the “analysis” of a project as spidernethewood, which could be the narration?
What can be considered important in a project as spidernethewood is that it face the matter of disappearance, of volatility, of lightness.
Spidernethewood is a structure that somehow confuses nature with architecture; nature and structure are made “not differentiable” or “indistinct.”
The physicality of an architecture made of immateriality.
It is an architecture shaped by porosity, by empty building structures and no more by the constitution of a density.
Which is the intellectual work proposed in the elaboration of a project like this?
The project introduces an accessibility of thought but at the same time elaborates a defacement protocol: it defaces the common language of the encoded architecture.
We’ll take, for instance, the entrance of a residence.
The thermal barrier normally lays at the entrance of a house. It usually exists an outside, well distinguished from an inside.
It is an important matter in a residence’s planning: we usually expect “to enter” somewhere, with all that the entrance foresees of ceremonial, of formalized.
We frequently find at the entrance a small carpet with on written “bonjour chez vous”, therefore the entrance becomes a ritual, a ceremonial motion, even if is not well suitable, or is poor etc..
In the realized project, we wanted to delete this relationship with the facade.
We wanted to delete the relationship to the way of making architecture that deals with the frontality of the facade, through the frontality of the appearance.
The project has nothing to do with the codification of the entrance, or to the codification of this ceremonial of the individual ownership.
Despite the residence has a private owner, the project is not focused on the determination of ownership in its materiality and appearance; it is a contrary project, it doesn’t have an “ownership” iconography anymore. It doesn’t refers to the idea of an owner that capitalizes a territory; it is released by the idea of possession and occupation of a territory.
Telling the true, something is disposed, obviously it is not a “collectivist” or a “sharing” project but equally we have tried to empty it from that sense of territory ownership and from pretentiousness.
It doesn’t foresee any of the arrogance of an architecture; both that the architecture is beautiful, sophisticated or poor, or pretentious.
The topic is the opposite of all that can be made visible or that has to do with the tangibility, the materiality. This has been the interest: to release the architecture from all the archetypes of the invariability, of the heaviness, of the materiality of an object that conquers a territory.
What are the suggestions given by the forest environment where the residence is planned?
It is a structure that can be “easily” elaborate in a forest.
In the collective
unconscious, the forest is the place where witches live, where we can easy think at paranormal, at a scary tale, at what it is unknown.
We like to believe in the presence of witches, elves, harpies, and small dangerous animals of whom origin is not known.
Work out a project of that kind has been almost simpler because we let the territory to guide us, it is well more reasonable to think about the unknown and mystical in the beauty mean of a forest than in a city.
It is obvious that working on a project of this kind in a city would have been somehow more difficult. The project used the existing forest, not so beautiful but however useful, to develop, inside this, something that is in relationship with alien, unconscious, paranormal.
An architectural project that wants to release from the traditions and that wants to propose something else.
How do materials and geometric forms established by the project, mirror the native’s narration of architecture’s identification with nature and the idea of “not colonization” of a territory?
The outside parts are constituted of nets to protect from the audacity of the nature: these allow to cut the branches of the trees that would otherwise insinuate into the runs. The nets lean on the ground, as they were cobwebs.
The interior project has the same geometric composition of the outside but it changes the material: polyhetylene curtains.
Is it possible to state that inside, the impression is to be in a removable awning; the impression is the same that you can have when you’re in a camping sojourn.
Materials alludes to an object that can be transformed, removed; once more this architecture doesn’t return to the idea of heaviness, of monumentality, of stillness.
Materials also recount an exercise in style: a structure that has nothing predictable but proposes a shock, a new unstable conception among what is inside and what is outside.
What is the “construction detail” in an architectural project that deals with the narration of an idea? Which is, in your opinion, the way to approach an application of analysis of the “constructive detail”?
The “construction detail analysis” is connected to the analysis of intellectual ability.
The “construction detail” should not be analyzed for its mechanical parts but rather as part of the narration.
Teachers push to look at the “construction detail” so that students can reproduce it in their projects in an endless repetition of what has been done.
The true problem is that in Italy, France, Spain, the intellectual ability is almost entirely lost.
Especially in France it seems that we can only see projects which are copies of copies of copies: an imitations of words already said, an endless repetition of projects.
We are incredibly overwhelmed by Beaux Arts system of repetition, a tread of what has been said.
Architecture is not in details, it deals with phenomenology.
The detail is a space percepetion vector, therefore of architecture perception, it’s a vector of transmission through which we can cross a space, the detail makes the space accessible.
The detail acts on the perceptive phenomenology.
But the detail in itself is pure fascination.
An architect drawing can express the articulation and connection of the metallic pieces but the drawing that comes out from there, taken in its singleness, it’s absolutely meaningless.
In those projects too detailed, in which architects become crazy in detailing drawings, it happens that they forget the meaning that the architecture itself wants to express.
You end up forgetting which is the message to transmit, which is the narration, which is the scenery that allows to tell a history.
When I try to produce a detail of a construction detail, I do it in a way that never contradicts the narration that I want to elaborate.
The detail belongs to the narration, not to architecture.
We need to let an engineer or an expert to make the detail the simplest possible, sometimes to trivialize the detail so that the attention could be completely absorbed by the narration.
In spidernethewood’s case, if I had over-detailed the metallic pillars (that certainly had to be graphically made in plans) these would have assumed too importance in comparison to the idea of project.
Nevertheless, this speech doesn’t deny the necessity to have a conscience of the structure.
It is useful to draw some details and to understand the structure but we need to draw imagining not to do it at all. The drawing must be only the papery interpretation of an idea.
The drawing must be interpreted and therefore it will necessarily postpone to ancient or modern constructive technologies. But it is not the point.
The detail that we go to define tells a lot about the history.
Over-detail a constructive detail is absolutely a loss of time, and therefore a loss of money, of economy.
It is, above all, the loss of a conception of the project as a narrative vehicle.
Renzo Piano or Richard Rogers have had full faculty to draw their sophisticated details.
But perhaps it was correct to do it in the context of a well-defined historical period in which the engineeristic theme was extremely important.
The detail is a magic and fantastic mystification of a past known.
Magic, magnificent knowledge, but this kind of knowledge is not straightly necessary for the idea of an architectural narration.
Renzo Piano or Richard Rogers tell the history of the Sixties, years where engineering was thought as a vector of progress. It is the case of the Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou.
They thought that the constructive detail could modify the form and the substance of the construction. The building wanted specifically to adapt itself to the functional prerogatives and to the dynamic development.
It arises from a particular fascination of the epoch to the engineer that deals with the possibility of assemblage /disassemblage. Fascination to the technical detail that gives the impression of having the power to play with the structure according to demands. As if architecture was a recreational item, but in the reality it is not assemblable / disassemblable as easily as it sounds.
Therefore today, entering the Beaubourg, we will certainly have a sort of fascination for the technology but, at the same time, we are conscious of the end of the transformation.
As a sclerosis of the engeneering process.
We are definitely conscious of an architectural illusion that proposed the possibility to play with space that has never been given.
Tags: architecture teaching, François Roche, immaterial architecture, light architecture, porous architecture, R&Sie (n)., science fiction
