Led by Pritzker Prize laureate Anne Lacaton, the jury of the European Collective Housing Awards has just selected the winners for its first edition. Established by the Basque Architecture Institute and Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture in collaboration with the Department of Territorial Planning, the award celebrates innovation and excellence in collective housing design, emphasizing aesthetics, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability. The winning projects - La Borda Housing Collective in Spain and the Conversation of a Wine Storage into Housing in Switzerland - were selected from 171 entries across 19 European countries for their contributions to new construction and renovation, respectively.
Anne Lacaton, renowned for her groundbreaking work with partner Jean-Philippe Vassal, has been working to push the boundaries of sustainable and socially responsible housing architecture for decades. The Pritzker Prize laureates are celebrated for their innovative approach to social housing and are committed to enhancing the quality of life for residents. Their philosophy centers around creating generous, adaptable spaces that rethink how we live together. Onsite in San Sebastián, ArchDaily had the chance to interview the Pritzker-Prize winner to delve into her architectural practice and philosophy. In the conversation, the architect explored core values, the significance of reuse in social housing, and the promising trends in collective housing design that emerged from the first edition of the awards.
Read on to discover more about the principles and insights that guide Anne Lacaton’s acclaimed work, as well as her perspectives on the future of collective housing.
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AL: I think it's based since the very beginning on the approach with the conviction that housing is something extremely important for everybody and that what is proposed to inhabitants as housing most often is not a space very desirable or not large enough to have an excellent life. From the very beginning, we were involved in the question of how we could give more freedom for people to live in the space. In fact, it is about the generosity of space. It was something that we wanted to explore because we had the feeling that it was important to change the way housing was received or standardized. And it has nothing to do with the cost. We always say that whatever the cost or the budget you have, we should be able, as architects, to produce more space and a better space. And that's what we did.
AD: Your projects often focus on renovation or reuse as a methodology of social housing rather than new constructions. What are the key benefits of this approach for communities and the environment?
AL: In 30 years of practice, many things have changed: the rules, all these new norms on saving energy, and working with the climate. We have always been interested in how housing should also work much better with climate and should take advantage of the resources of climate instead of closing and insulating. But step by step, we have improved. And afterwards, it joined the issue of reuse of buildings, because it became something very critical in the 2000s and very important in France with a new policy of demolition and reconstruction that we didn't agree with.
And we wanted to work on that and to see what could be done instead of demolishing. And it was something very important to us, but also which is linked with the other topic of giving more space and being generous. And if you have an existing structure, you have 60% of the work done. And you can add the 40% which is missing. So, all of this is based on this. But it's not only for housing. For any project, we are really involved in this issue of giving freedom.
AD: Serving as the jury president for the first edition of the European Collective Housing Award, what trends in collective housing design have you found most promising?
AL: It is important to advocate collective housing first. Because we need to work with collective housing, and we cannot extend more cities. We cannot end up living in small houses anymore. I don't talk about the countryside, but living in a small house around the city is not reasonable anymore. So, we must make the collective housing more than just a collective space.
We have to make the collective places as attractive as a house, with a garden, with a neighbor. And I think it’s possible. It's just a way of thinking the housing differently.
So, collective housing is attractive because it makes people closer. Making people closer should create a friendly relationship and not a conflictual relationship. This is why it's so important to consider that individual space is as important as collective space. Because if we just think in terms of collective, and if you have very tiny and uninteresting spaces, you cannot expect that people will be open enough to have good relations with others in the communal. This is very important because it's not always the case. Very often today, programs give all importance to communal, while individual space keeps shrinking. Generous space for the individual creates a better communal space. That's very important.
Everybody needs privacy, something private. They will take more pleasure in being with others if they know that they can be alone and well somewhere. So, it's important to understand this and not think that everything should be communal for collective housing to succeed.
AD: The European Collective Housing Award emphasizes aesthetics, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability. Can you share what qualities or features in the winning project stood out to you and the jury?
AL: When we talk about housing, we talk about space and relation, space as a space of relation. And it's important to place this at the core of the design. All the rest is something that is coming from this. Sustainable design, you know, construction, aesthetics, materials. So, in the projects that we have selected, the winning projects, we have found all of this. For La Borda there is also something special about it, it's an interesting production model. It's cooperative. But in both cases, every place you take is sought out comprehensively.
It's sought in a positive and generous way. For me, it’s important when we talk about housing or any architecture, not to forget that architecture is first a space for living in a large sense. And that space is not something you can look at from the outside. It's a space that you experience. So you are inside. And for us, the facade and the aesthetics come from the decision of which kind of relation we want to define between inside and outside, between you and the others. So when it defines the nature of the separation or the openness, this is not a choice of material. It's a choice of the material that fits the quality of relations you want to achieve.
AD: While your work in Europe has significantly impacted social housing, how do you see your principles and approaches being adapted to social housing projects in other parts of the world, particularly in developing countries?
AL: You know, I think if you consider the question of space and how to live in the space, how to live together, how to react to the climate, with the environment, how you make it possible for everybody. You cannot be mistaken. And afterward, it's just an issue of understanding the place where you are. And the answer will not be the same in Europe, in France, in Africa, or in the US. But if you approach it with these fundamental questions, then I don't see why it should fail somewhere.
I think that if you are in this attitude of, on the one hand, generous position, generous intention, and on the other hand, careful observation of where you are, then the combination should create good things.
So, for me, maybe it's very optimistic. But I see that in some countries, in Africa for example, you see how some housing is organized, or you see that there is this care with different tools, with different materials, but it works. If we are in some fundamental philosophy or principles, I don't see why it should not work everywhere.
