The Balance of Uses

Our philosophy runs against an old figure of the profession, that of the demiurge architect who descends on a place with a ready-made vision and expects its inhabitants to conform to it. This stance has produced fine images and many uninhabitable houses. A home is not a monument raised to its author, it is the discreet frame of a life that does not belong to it. Those who inhabit a place know things about it that no plan shows, where the sun falls in the morning, which room comforts on rainy days, which threshold the children cross running. To ignore this knowledge is to build beside life.

For us, a project is carried and built in cohesion between architects and the people who inhabit the place. It begins with long conversations, before any drawing. How a weekday morning unfolds, where one likes to have coffee, how one entertains, how one withdraws, what one keeps and what one wants to let go of. The attention paid to the way inhabitants wish to live is the main driver of our architectural thinking. It decides the place of a kitchen well before questions of style, it draws a corridor the way one settles a habit. The project then moves forward through back and forth exchanges, our proposals rub against their uses, their remarks refine our plans, and each side shifts the other a little.

From this exchange is born what we call the balance of uses, a state of the project where the architect's know-how and the inhabitants' way of living no longer argue, but answer one another. We bring measure, light, material, the coherence of the whole, they bring the truth of their daily life. Success is not judged on delivery day, it is judged years later, when the house wears the habits of its occupants like a well-fitted garment, and one no longer quite knows what comes from them and what comes from us. It is the opposite of a signed work, it is a shared place.