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Disturbing readymade
Eric Lapierre for materials , No. 7, August 2004

Tradition and spontaneity Disturbing readymade

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The order of the ordinary

- Architecture Without
Qualities
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"[...] The choice of these" ready-mades "was never

dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a
reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total
absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anesthesia . "
Marcel Duchamp

[1]

" Just do it . "

Anne Lacaton

[2]

"[The economy] is a process of work, but not a starting

point. She is not making architecture, but is an excellent means
to produce what we want to happen without being slow by
budgetary constraints " [3] explains Anne Lacaton. The
economy thus envisaged as a process is close to the meaning
that had the ancient authors, and its classical denition of "
order in the conduct of a house "; it could be considered as
building organizational system rather than a formal system. In
the house built in Coutras in 2000 Lacaton Anne and JeanPhilippe Vassal grow so far their formatting logic "no decision"
[4]

, and submit their project to such a rigorous economy of

means, they move the some architectural limits admitted
categories, and force us to question the very status of the
architectural object.

Use
" The question of the use is for us the priority " [5] .
This axiom is based the "economic" approach Lacaton and
Vassal. With the consequent desire to avoid any formal
overdetermination buildings that limit their ability ownership: "
Our concern is always to stop at some point to make way for the
locals; it is for him to nish, to occupy a way that is not
necessarily what we had imagined. In the denition of nishes,
we do not want to go too far in the expression " [6] . The
attention to the use induces a withdrawn position in the
denition of the form which involves in design details of the
adoption of simple solutions and, if not neutral, at least not
expressive. A neutral expression signal a focus on the form
itself that architects reject: "[...] we do not care of the exterior of
our buildings " [7] says Jean-Philippe Vassal. Thinking
architecture from the use leads to pursue a comfort that borders
on "luxury": " Our ambition is to produce quality, luxury,
housing related, in the sense: what is that can be produced that
would not imagine being able to afford? " [8] . And luxury is
being able to live in large thermally controlled surfaces.
The criteria "large area" and "thermal comfort" are
performance-oriented and non-formal. Their adoption led
Lacaton and Vassal to reassess both, contemporary architectural
production and post-war: " We like the International Style, as
this very simple architecture produces a real spatial generosity:
it offers views, comfort and is resolutely modern. This
architecture seems to meet the aspirations of contemporary
society better than the complex architecture, formalist and
ashy today. We try to practice today an efcient architecture of
the same type and which allows to offer the same spatial
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the same type and which allows to offer the same spatial
[9]

generosity " . Efciency here refers to the economy of

means. Consider the buildings in terms of performance, it is
approaching the project denition work as the establishment of
a process based on the denition of an algorithm which
performantiel form a result, almost "automatic" way

[10]

Lightness
In support of their research capabilities to the largest
economy, and Vassal Lacaton seeking what they call the
lightness : an attempt to meet the need for protection that is
expected of a building with the minimum of things, that n is
reminiscent analyzes Reyner Banham in the Well Tempered
Environment [11] . Jean-Philippe Vassal concretely experienced
this kind of lightness and climate relevance when he lived in
[12]

Niger in the 1980s

: a few pious and a piece of cloth is
sufcient to constitute a shelter.
The house in Coutras, consisting of two greenhouses
transparent corrugated polycarbonate, laid side-by-side manifest
a similar lightness. One of the greenhouses, which hosts the
vital functions - living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, toilet
- is insulated and lined against wood-plated; the other is left
blank, no specic allocation area open to requests from
residents. The assembly is placed on a concrete slab in the
paufre bank, which is the single intervention "heavy" of the
site, which we feel it may be, one day, the only thing remaining
of the house.
The light here refers to the physical lightness of
constructed objects: the house is as light as a windbreaker. It
doubles as a form of ontological more lightness, which gives
meaning to the adoption of constructive solutions and explicitly
simple implementation. Wooden panels against-plated glass
door of the house Latapie, or standard light bulbs simply
suspended their electrical son in the house in Coutras, show a
form of evidence: the withdrawal of architects from what which
could be the "design" of their buildings is such that the solutions
tend to a form of anonymity that "lighten" the construction of its
exceptional work of character. Again, the solutions adopted seek
less expressive neutrality that the maximum erase authors who
are not in the aestheticized banality of a timeless architectural
object, which " would seem to have always existed ," as could
the Auguste Perret, but the ability to build, here and now, and
here and now, items that are both lightweight and powerful,
almost devoid of artistic intentions and that, somehow, do not
claim anything not even the fact that they are.
This architecture is also lightweight as it is devoid of
pathos, she did not comment, nor on the sites in which it takes
place, not on itself, and it goes to give up any idea of
sustainability " it is very interesting to work with the idea in
mind that we do not build for eternity, not even fty years. In
this way the architecture would lose its heaviness " [13] .
Lacaton and Vassal working on the issue of housing, seen not
just in the home but in fact of living spaces whatsoever. The
house induces lightness because it opposes the weight of
monumental [14] . More architecture is monumental, less traces
of use are readable, and the architecture is needed to itself. In
buildings of Lacaton and Vassal, use and his footsteps are at the
forefront. The images they publish from home to show the
Coutras invested by everyday objects: the bike in the winter
garden, the sofa facing the TV, the food in the kitchen shelves,
dry cloth pending storage on a table, a computer on a desk
facing a window, etc. Everything demonstrates the simple,
lightweight operating a house without design : a domestic
economy in action. There is no trace here of distanced irony and
elitist inner "ordinary" of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown: objects are displayed respectfully as usual vectors and
are not transformed into symbols of a special cultural or social
conditions.
The apparent disorder of the house reects the open about
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The apparent disorder of the house reects the open about

the use and opposes a xed spatial composition. His "fuzzy"
character refers to other possible uses of the place, like a truly
free plan. An expensive aesthetic to Henry David Thoreau,
builder of the house in which he lived more than two years
away from the world to the edge of Walden Pond in
Massachusetts: " What I see today of architectural beauty,
came, I know gradually from inside to outside, necessities and
character of the inhabitant, which is the only manufacturer [...]
the most interesting houses in this country [...] are the most
devoid of pretension, humble huts and cottages of wood trunks
of the poor in general; that's life of the inhabitants of which are
the shells, and not just some peculiarity in these areas, which
makes them picturesque ; and equally interesting will be the
citizen suburban box, when the life of this one will be as simple
and pleasing to the imagination, and we also feel little effort to
[15]

the effect in the style of his home "

. Thoreau essentially
talking about the simple beauty of the primitive hut . The house
in Coutras is a primitive hut this time [16] . Its open and resulting
aesthetic is based on a type of economy means that returns less
to Minimalism, mainly concerned formal questions as Arte
Povera, whose representatives often worked on process and on
the size almost holy poverty. Moreover, despite supercial
relationships, work and Lacaton Vassal differs from the
Brutalism of the post-war by its lack of expressive ambition.

Readymade
In the house in Coutras, Lacaton and Vassal conducted
such a strong reduction of the architectural elements that the
house is an architectural readymade resulting from the
implantation on the site of two manufactured objects whose
form has not changed [ 17] .
What remains of "architectural" in an architecture that
reduced much? What makes this ready-made house is different
in our eyes mundane greenhouses are found in the landscape of
Coutras area? What makes us consider it as a work of
architecture, despite its maximum relief artistic intentions?
Anne Lacaton indicates a rst track: " Less material is
also less cost, and it is a completely straightforward way to
implement things, to assume the materials, to assume the
assemblies: this performance, also becomes an aesthetic
quality. "

[18]

. The aesthetic "direct", similar to that of the

readymade and the found object, through the XX th century,

implemented by artists who all, in the image of Lacaton and
Vassal in Coutras, seek to identify closer to the profound nature
of their respective medium, and maintain their energy as they
have "in the wild". Le Corbusier and calls " wild " [19] the style
of a railing reinforced concrete roof of an inn-restaurant he
imagines built on the beach of a Breton village for which it
represents modernity ; Jackson Pollock explains: " I approach
painting in the sense that we approach the drawing; that is to
say directly. I do not work from drawings, I do not turn
sketches, drawings, and color drawings, painting. " [20] ;
Morton Feldman says, in response to the "chronometer"
conception of time in classical music: " Frankly, this approach
time bored. I am not a watchmaker. What interests me is to get
some time in its unstructured existence. That is to say, what
interests me is how this wild beast lives in the jungle - not the
zoo. I am interested in how time exists before we ask our paws
on it - our minds, our imaginations in him " [21] ; Joseph Beuys
describing two wooden boxes made of irregular planks crudely
assembled by nailing, concluded: " But I would say [...] that it
would be narrow-minded if someone told me there left , that
exceeds far more than the right. Yes, I would say if it is the same
length on both sides, then disappears single pulse of taking
something and nailing it to something else, then life disappears
from the object " [22] .
This savagery research necessarily involves the removal
of authors who bring to the fore their medium rather than their
own pathos. Such works are more open process than nished
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own pathos. Such works are more open process than nished
objects. Pollock has welcomed a critic once wrote that his
[23]

images " had neither beginning nor end "

. Parts of mature
Feldman did not, either, strictly speaking, to start or end. As for
sculpture Beuys, they are worth, for the most part, that as a
result of action taken. One recalls, nally, that Le Corbusier has
added "after the fact" in the process of developing the project of
the Convent of La Tourette, elements as crucial as the organ,
public speaking, or the spiral staircase; formal imperfection of
the nal plan suggests he could add or subtract, and all still
work. The house is in Coutras, too, primarily a process has
started: the establishment of a series of possibilities - including
that of its own demise, making it a paradoxical living object .

uncanny
Why works of art, which are by denition artifacts, they
earn to stand as close to a state that could be considered as the
"natural" elements? The works do not they lose relevance,
strength, and freedom, wanting to nd expressions as inevitable
as natural phenomena?

[24]

I will ask the assumption that this allows us to say a

building "where there is architecture", spring to a confusing and
unsettling feeling that has to do with the uncanny . In the
eponymous text, Freud proposes to identify a " particular kind
[25]

of scary, dating back to the long-known, long familiar ."

He
notes that Heimlich - "familiar" - is so ambivalent that it means,
[26]

in some senses, his own hand, unheimlich

and concludes,
moreover, that the feeling of the uncanny occurs when "
something repressed [which was not necessarily scary initially]
[27]

did return "

. Hence the ambivalent feeling, which combines
both the known and the unknown, and the ability to reexperience a supposedly unknown. It describes, nally, two
types of situations in which manifests the uncanny: "[...] when
infantile complexes repressed are revived by printing or when
[28]

primitive beliefs exceeded appear again conrmed "

. The "
infantile complexes " refer to each individual and his own
particular history; the " primitive beliefs " refer to the stadium
" animist " each of the development, the image of " our
primitive ancestors " [29] has, at the time of his psychic
development, believed in the return of the dead, that inanimate
objects could have a soul, or any other representation "magic"
of the world. These beliefs, we have collectively exceeded,
remain for many, according to Freud, still alive in a dormant
state, waiting only a sign to revive and be "conrmed".
Returning to the architecture and ask two new
hypotheses: as a writer you never invent anything from nothing;
as a viewer, one can not only access work that we know to spare
them a known path. Essentially original work would be
condemned to being heard as its author. The work is still
playing the dialectic of the known and the unknown: that of
architecture, with a dimension irreducible archaic, probably
more than any other. From this point of view it has to do with
the uncanny.
The space here to analyze in detail the analogy between
architectural phenomena and the uncanny [30] . Let's just say it is
as if what Freud meant by " repressed infantile complexes "
referred, by analogy, in architecture, the buildings evocative
capacity. The fact that a construction, by its shape and presence,
refers to one or more other or, in any case, to something else.
The architecture is so often in the more or less direct register of
metaphor and evocation, whether an anthropomorphic
dimension, that it refers to its own history or any other thing
already known, it s 'based on the "already there" in various
forms.
What Freud identied by " primitive convictions " refers
by analogy to a "outdated" architecture design, non scholarly
construction, vernacular. The fascination with the vernacular
architecture of the architects explained by their desire to seize
the "direct" aesthetics and franchise solutions that characterize
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the "direct" aesthetics and franchise solutions that characterize

it. The analogy with the uncanny shows us that architecture is
learned from such ambivalence as architectural attitudes can be
dened mostly by oxymorons. "Erudite vernacular architecture"
could describe the house in Coutras.

Architecture
We understand better now what distinguishes our eyes a
vulgar horticultural greenhouse. The greenhouse "Winter
Garden" is gross; it has, like all his fellows, an anemometer,
visible on the front. The greenhouse "programmed" is "helped"
[31] ; it is lined and insulated, and equipped, in front of a TV
antenna. The standard unmodied greenhouse to measure the
intervention by which all turned into a house, how the
anemometer has turned into TV antenna. The repetition of two
identical volumes, evokes the greenhouses to the "wild" state,
when aligned in the landscape, and architectural impact of this
brute repetition, which fascinated Aldo Rossi in his time, about
the cabins range, especially. Repetition also evokes duplication:
" A [...] important aspect of the readymade is its lack of
uniqueness ... the replica of a readymade delivering the same
[32]

message "
. This alone and found to be three reasons:
instability of interpretation lends richness and essence of the
architectural fact.
By reducing their involvement in the selection of two
greenhouses, and Vassal seem Lacaton give up their
prerogatives architects as "directors form" and mark a
withdrawal so strong that it could appear as a desertion of the
architectural eld. Instead, the busy household traces of life of
its inhabitants - Anne Lacaton expresses very attached " to the
ability of architecture to show the uses it generates " explicitly manifests the tension created between the original
appearance of greenhouses, still readable, and home use made
of it. Drying laundry, sofa, table, etc., in a greenhouse: we are
here in the heart of the dialectic of re-known into the unknown
that characterizes the uncanny. There, no doubt, there are
architecture, architecture a reduced and, hence, precipitated, in
what is essential is that strange inner tension born of an
interpretation instability which imposes an awakening
permanent. By establishing, for use as a shortcut literally
surreal, Lacaton and Vassal give to hear one of the fundamental
dimensions of architecture: that of the shift and tension caused
by the need to use known and recognizable materials in a
context and a new work always. By installing the daily life of
residents in the greenhouses, they show us the architectural
quality that these objects have to "wild" - in doing so they
change the look until we could carry on them - and manage to
the bringing within the scholarly eld of architecture without
reducing their strength or their original efciency. Finally, they
managed to give them a sense architecture based entirely on the
quality of use, while showing the beauty and poetic value of
these: an encounter with a sofa and a greenhouse on a eld is
near that of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting
table.
By implementing such an economy of means, they show
that in terms of reducing architecture understood ways led to an
intensication of the effects; effects that are, at the same time
meaningful. Reduce the effects of credible means trying to give
a learned and articial work the evidence of its opposite: a work
of Nature. As Jackson Pollock suggested itself when responding
to a critic who pointed out to him that he did not paint from life:
" I am nature ."

[1] Mr. Duchamp, "About of" Ready-mades "," conference at

MOMA, New York, October 19, 1961.
[2] conversation with A. Lacaton, Paris, 2 June 2004.
[3] Op. Cit ., Footnote 2.
[4] I and refers to draft procedures where the resulting shape is
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[4] I and refers to draft procedures where the resulting shape is

not preconceived.
[5] Op. Cit ., Footnote 2.
[6] Ibid .
[7] Conversation with JP Vassal, Paris, 22 July 2003.
[8] Op. Cit ., Footnote 2.
[9] conversation with JP Vassal, Paris, 22 July 2003.
[10] On the issue of the resulting shape, see E. Lapierre,
Architecture du rel - Contemporary Architecture in France ,
Paris, Le Moniteur, 2003.
[11] Reyner Banham, The Well Tempered Environment 1969.
[12] From 1980 to 1985 JP Vassal was architect and urban
planner in Niger, in the context of development programs.
[13] "Conversation con Patrice Goulet / A Conversation with
Patrice Goulet" in 2G , No. 21, "Lacaton & Vassal", Barcelona,
2002, p. 126.
[14] Questioning the reason that wants an airport lobby makes
ten meter ceiling when four sufce, A. Lacaton concluded: "
This has to do with a certain lightness in architecture that goes
against what remains of the idea of the monument, green
building is not here to answer for use at a given time, but to say
something of the order of politics and power. In itself, this order
is outdated. ". Ibid. Pp. 125-126.
[15] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the woods , Paris,
Gallimard, 1990, p. 48 (translated from English by L. Fabulet).
Original Walden , published in 1854.
[16] Signicantly, Lacaton and Vassal states that " no matter
the project on which they work, [they draw] the plan of the
house Farnsworth on the same scale to see if they are bigger ...
" ( Op. cit ., footnote 15, p. 140). This Polaris kind of work is,
too, a primitive hut of his time.
[17] The use of readymade properly belongs to the architectural
universe. Hand-washing in the lobby of the Villa Savoye in the
"strategy available" by Jacques Ferrier ( in Jacques Ferrier,
architect , Paris, Pedestrian Crossing, 2000), through the
materials "as found" the Brutalist his presence, whose history
remains to be written is obvious, at least since the industrial
Revolution.
[18] Op. Cit ., Footnote 2.
[19] Le Corbusier's modern architecture Almanac , Paris, 1926.
[20] J. Pollock, "Interview with William Wright," 1950. In Pepe
Karmel, (Ed.) Jackson Pollock - Interviews, Articles, and
Reviews , New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1999, p. 2022.
[21] Mr. Feldman, "Between classes" in Morton Feldman,
Writings and words , (texts collected by J.-Y. Bosseur and D.
Cohen-Levinas), Paris, L'Harmattan, 1998 (translation of D.
Bosseur). Original publication, in The Dial , Houston, Texas, in
September 1969.
[22] J. Beuys, in J. Beuys and V. Harlan, What is art? , Paris,
L'Arche, 1992, pp. 64-65. Original edition in allmand, Was ist
Kunst? Stuttgart, Verlag Urachhaus Johannes M. Mayer GmbH.
[23] Op. Cit ., Footnote 23, p. 19.
[24] Lacaton Vassal and explain about the house in Lege CapFerret: " What is important is to push ideas to their logical
conclusions; that is to say, in this case, to keep the land as it is,
not to change the prole of the dune, do not cut the trees, not
two, not one, no! [...] Our customers then have no choice,
because once a few things were decided in common, we will as
far as possible with those choices , " op. cit ., footnote 15, p.
132.
[25] S. Freud, "Das Unheimliche" in Sigmund Freud, The
Disturbing tanget and other tests , Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p.

215. Originally published in German in 1919 in Imago , Volume

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215. Originally published in German in 1919 in Imago , Volume

5 (5-6).
[26] Translation unheimlich with "uncanny" is not without
problems of interpretation and translations are retained today,
according to the authors, "unfamiliar", "familiar strange", "not
as at home ".
[27] Op. Cit ., Footnote 29, p. 245.
[28] Ibid ., P. 258. It is Freud says.
[29] Ibid ., P. 256.
[30] On this issue, see E. Lapierre, op. cit ., footnote 10.
[31] In the sense that Duchamp called "assisted readymades"
readymades which he had to undergo modication.
[32] Op. Cit ., Footnote 1.
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