Post-Industrial Architecture: Strategic Structure / Tactical Space

Lacaton & Vassal - Ecole d'architecture, Nantes

After visiting our comprehensive studio’s site in Charleston this semester, I began to think a lot about the industrial ruins we found at the site.  There was something that spoke to me when I saw the crumbling docks, cracked concrete, rusted steel, and shattered windows of the former naval base’s infrastructure.  The materials served as a reminder to me that we live in a post-industrial age, and, as I reflected on our project being placed on the site, I asked myself what is an appropriate architecture for marking this moment in time?  After all, there was both beauty and a freedom of renovation embedded in the industrial ruins.

This notion of an architecture that gained phenomenological qualities as it aged and offered an open framework for spatial programing assuredly grabbed my attention when the work of the French firm, Lacaton & Vassal, was presented in class this past week.  I had heard of them when they were announced as the 2021 Pritzker Prize winner, but it was only after this week that I took the time to dive into their work and thoughts.  A core principle of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal is to achieve the maximum through the minimum.  As a result, the materials and detailing of their work is delicate, but also industrial.  The firm works on many affordable housing projects which require the use of everyday materials and durable materials to keep costs low and to prolong the life of the building.  Additionally, Lacaton & Vassal completes many adaptive reuse and renovation work in existing solid concrete structures which are quite standard constructions within the French building industry, but to an American these expansive concrete structures appear like industrial sites rather than housing.  By looking at the work through this lens, I believe there are strong suggestions on how to work within a post-industrial age.

To develop my own proposal for a post-industrial architecture, I connect the architecture of Lacaton & Vassal with the simple juxtaposition of “strategies” and “tactics” discussed by Michel de Certau in his work, The Practice of Everyday Life.  Strategies are stable and institutionally planned, and tactics are fluid and inevitably challenge the order posed by the institution.  If we consider the profession of architecture the institution, and we reduce the list of what we design to the thing which must be the most stable, the most strategic, to ensure livability, then we are only left with the building structure.  In the work of Lacaton & Vassal, they typically work within a pre-established strategy that is a result of industry, but what they develop within this framework is the opportunity for bottom-up tactics.  So when the institution is restricted to the structure, the space between is fair-game for inevitable, tactical gestures.  Through this architecture, space is completely given to the generators of tactics, the people.

An architecture of strategic structure and tactical space is likely the most representative of our post-industrial age because it erodes the authoritative, institutional order of industry by allowing for people to assume their agency in the space in-between.  Thus like the patina of the steel found at the former naval base, the tactical movements provide for something more beautiful and worldly.