Interview
It was late afternoon when I entered the R&Sie(n) studio– a former shop just a few steps away from Boulevard de Belleville. At the entrance there is a group of large cushions. The walls are covered with transparent bubble wrap. Like a weir, a narrow hall leads to a large room in the back. Here too, the walls are concealed behind foil and would almost look medically clean were it not for the countless sketches and renderings they are covered in. A laboratory, a studio, a factory? Perhaps a bit of everything. Seated on the cushions by the entrance, we finally started our interview with 20th Arrondissement Parisian life passing by on the other side of the window looking out on the street. An interview about buildings as fiction, new territories and prickly aliens in the Swiss mountains.
François Roche, together with your colleague and partner Stéphanie Lavaux you founded R&Sie(n) in 1989. Since then you have not published any photos of yourselves but instead display a computer-generated hybrid. Why this game of hide-and-seek?
François Roche:
We do not want our work to be associated with a particular person or face. In a way,
we want it to be unidentifiable. The image we show of ourselves is a hybrid of Stéphanie,
myself and people who worked in our office at the time. We wanted to show
that what we produce is a hybrid. For us, this is a criticism of what is common practice:
Nowadays many well-known architects represent themselves, above all. Instead of
buildings, they design an image of themselves.
They orchestrate themselves as brands.
François Roche:
Indeed, they are like L‘Oréal or some laundry detergent, while their architecture
should also be able to do without them as a person. We graduated from university in
the late 1980s. Perhaps this is why we are a little sensitive when it comes to celebrity
cult, because at the time everything was cannibalized by advertising which, in turn,
created its own stars. The fascination with these shamans, which architects and designers
have since purported to be, has continued to this day. We were fed up with this
self-marketing and are now trying a different approach.
Wofür steht eigentlich das Kürzel R(&)Sie(n)?
François Roche:
Here, the same holds true as for our portrait. R&Sie(n) is the arbitrary combination of
the initial letters of several names. Those of Stéphanie and me, as well as people we
worked with at the time. We wanted them to get a mention too. It is important for
everyone’s opinion to be taken into account. Architecture is a battlefield where conflicts
are dealt with. We experience this in our office every day. What I like about the
name is that it can be pronounced differently in every language. In German, it sounds
a bit like “Hören Sie” (“Listen!”) and the letters “R.S.I.” could also be seen as an acronym
of “reel, symbolique, imaginaire” – the title of a colloquium headed by Jaques Lacan,
who was a major influence on us. We are children of 1970s French philosophy born
just a bit too late, as we only discovered it in the late 1980s. Philosophy has never
been taught at architecture school, and is still not. There has to be something of this
longing in it.
How would you describe your work?
François Roche:
It is practice as fiction, fiction as practice, speculation, research. It cannot be broken
down to just one element. It is about thinking that reality is also partly fiction. It not
only consists of what we see, but at the same time hides another reality, a dream or
phantasm. Something that at times can even scare us. We are interested in the question
of how we can develop aesthetics from this. As such, reality becomes a narrative
strategy.
For your project “lost in Paris”, for example, you grew aggressive bacterial cultures in glass bulbs made specifically for this purpose and installed them in the garden of a Parisian townhouse. The threat thus became part of the project, which at the same time developed its own momentum.
François Roche:
The idea was to create bacteria on the building’s façade which would cause some of
the plants around them to die. This is not a form of ecology that comes from Disneyland
or befits the middle classes. However, these occurrences also constitute a
very natural process, though it can of course lead to problems with the neighbors.
We found the dynamics and fluency of the substances highly intriguing in terms of
architecture, the identity of which is, at the same time, questioned in this way. Its
boundaries become blurred.
You also caused slight irritation with your parking structure “Asphalt Spot” in the Japanese town of Tokamashi. Its parking spaces follow a dynamic wavy design, so that most of the vehicles stand on three wheels only. Where does this zest for risk come from?
François Roche:
What is interesting here is that when you are parking you have to observe the way
your own car responds. It assumes something animal-like – as if it were a horse. The
topography creates a danger without actually being dangerous. Yet it triggers something
in the observers that inevitably relates them to their built environment. We aim
to design buildings that do appear isolated, but that to some extent also fear their
own appearance and autonomy. They follow the aesthetics of the provisional and
unfinished, even if they were designed on a computer and boast ingenious details.
They convey their own fragility.
Listening to you one would almost think you are slightly scared of the architecture yourself.
François Roche:
We have a very complex and difficult relationship with our own authorities in the
field of architecture, be it in the administrative bodies, or institutions. We always say
that we are “immigrants by birth” in our own country. On the other hand, we are not
outsiders to the system either. In August, we will be taking part in the Architecture
Biennale in Venice for the eighth time and we teach at the Columbia University in
New York and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. But we attempt a different
approach. The laboratories in which we work at the universities explore a lot more
than just architecture. In the field of robots, for example, we have been looking into
how they could serve us as an active tool in the transformation of cities. The results of
this research are exhibitions that each focus on one specific topic.
Like your exhibition “Architecture des Humeurs” which was shown at the beginning of 2010 at “Le Laboratoire” in Paris and which explored the interfaces between architecture, neurobiology and mathematics.
François Roche:
Yes, for this project we spent three months collaborating with a team of ten scientists,
among them mathematicians, programmers and robot designers; we even put our
architectural projects on hold for it. This part of our work means a lot to us. We not
only aim to devote ourselves to professional practice and planning buildings, we also
wish to take the risk of establishing links with science and new technologies.
What role do digital media play in this? You started using computers for your planning processes early on.
François Roche:
When we discovered computers in 1995, we were almost the only ones who worked
this way. As architects who were born with a Rotring and experienced everything
from the first Mac, Windows 95 and then Windows 98, we witnessed how computers
became a democratic tool. We were able to integrate the metamorphosis of the tools
in our working process in real time. Since then, we have been trying to consider the
digital as a different territory which, at the same time, allows us to draw conclusions
about reality. A bit like “Utopia” by Thomas More.
Who in his 1516 novel of the same name describes a better society on a distant island...
François Roche:
Yes, for utopia is crucial for architecture. It allows the distance necessary to look at
the present with a critical eye. The fact that Utopia is set in the present makes More’s
novel so interesting. For him it was not a projection into the future, but a possibility
that existed then, but in a different place. We have always been interested in this type
of utopia. Not the utopia of futurists or of the 19th century which was in some way
religious. Today, we accept being subjugated in order to be freed in the future, when
everything will be better. This is the mechanism the modern age has adopted from
religion. Our form of utopia is based on speculation. We visualize a specific future
scenario and aim to approach it with the help of technology and through our collaboration
with scientists.
How do you approach a project?
François Roche:
We approached the great dimensions very carefully. We have to identify a property,
examine it, and deduce a scenario. Many architects have an enormous fear of the
location and still bank on international and interchangeable architecture. We prefer
developing a project in situ and based on a specific location. However, this also
means that we are not able to repeat something we have done before, which, in turn
is extremely time-consuming and expensive. But maybe this is the romantic side of
us. (laughs)
What projects are you working on at the moment?
François Roche:
We are currently working on the new building for the “B_Mu” museum in Bangkok,
which with 5,000 square meters of usable space and 30 meters in height, will be our
largest construction to date. With “Water Flux“ we are, moreover, working on a project
in Switzerland which will serve as an information center on the shrinking of glaciers.
It is a cocoon, being built entirely from wood, with no concrete whatever. A bit like
self-supporting bodyworks in car construction. The wood is sourced from the surrounding
forests, milled digitally and subsequently assembled in situ. The tentacles
on the façade are designed to retain the snow in winter. The building is located at an
altitude of 2,000 meters. Given the shape the snow can collect easily on the façade ,
so the building will change its appearance completely with the seasons. It will work
in the opposite way to a tree: In summer, it will be naked and visible; in winter, it will
be completely covered in snow.
How would you describe the body of the building, the inner structure of which is configured as a flowing spatial arrangement?
François Roche:
I am interested in architecture the individual parts of are no longer recognizable and
which no longer allow for differentiation between structure, membrane, skin, wall
or ceiling. A bit like in Hippocrates’ medicine, where the body was not yet divided
into organs, but understood as a flow of liquids. Gilles Deleuze and Antonin Artaud,
too, described this “body without organs”. Today, as it were, neurobiology is coming
round to this point of view again, dividing the body into zones, between which the
substances flow. Another interesting aspect about this construction is the way we
pushed it through.
Are you referring to the approval through the obligatory referendum?
François Roche:
Yes, in Switzerland it is not easy to build a radical structure like this. The isolated
village of Évolène with its 2,000 inhabitants is located high up in a glacial valley. A
very special form of carnival has survived here to this day. During the carnival, the
inhabitants wear monstrous, wooden masks and beat each other. This goes on for
three days, during which time the public space becomes a violent space. When the
voting was imminent, the mayor told me in advance there was no way it was going to
get through. I then took one of these masks to the assembly and explained that the
building, which looks a bit like a monster itself, would work in exactly the same way.
While the masks serve to drive out the winter, the museum would aim to do the same
with global warming. After all, only 20 years ago the site earmarked for the development
of the building was still covered with glacial ice. The people liked the fact that I
explained the building with a personal story rather than with the functionality of its
façade, and ultimately approved it. The fact that a backwater such as this mountain
village agreed to such a building caused a veritable sensation in Switzerland. Even we
were surprised. (laughs)
Thank you very much for the interview.
Interview: Norman Kietzmann
Norman Kietzmann studied industrial design in Berlin and Paris and writes as a freelance
journalist about architecture and design for publications such as Baunetz Designlines,
Deutsch, Plaza, Odds and Ends. He lives and works in Milan.
project management: Andrea Nakath
