Adapt and survive

THE CLAMOUR THAT GREETED the awarding of the Pritzker Prize — architecture’s Nobel — to the French practice Lacaton & Vassal in April this year was near universal throughout the architecture world. A rare thing indeed. Lacaton & Vassal represent that elusive thing in contemporary architecture, a combination of sheer talent and a strong sense of historical mission with the political implications that implies.

It is telling, however, that the practice probably didn’t win the prize for their new-build work, though it is certainly exceptional. The FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk is a fabulous structure, based on the renovation of an old boat warehouse in the dock area. By building a copy of the first building to the same dimensions, the architects confer an eerie symbolism. Which is the ghost — the original or its simulacrum? The dead industry or the result of cultural regeneration? It is a profoundly poetic structure: part Arthur Koestler, part Rachel Whiteread.

But most of the commentary from around the world focused on other projects; the transformation of three blocks of social housing in Bordeaux and another 1960s-built block in Paris. A new social mission for architecture appears to be coalescing around these buildings. “Their work provides a response to the climatic and ecological emergencies of the time, as well as to the social emergency, in particular in the field of housing,” ran the Pritzker jury citation. Lacaton & Vassal have created an “architecture as powerful in its form as in its convictions … as transparent in its aesthetics as in its ethics.”