a+u 663

Tristan Chadney, Laurent Esmilaire, Éric Lapierre
a+u’s December issue features the work of Paris-based architects Experience, headed by Tristan Chadney, Laurent Esmilaire, and Éric Lapierre. In their words, theirs is “a cultural, typological approach” toward architecture in search of the “marvelous” – a pursuit captured in their unique method of precisely photographed, meticulously made models and remarkably drawn “music box” axonometric drawings. The firm’s meditations on architectural form are so rational that they loop into the surreal, a paradox apparent in the 19 works presented in this issue. On the one hand, in House for a Collector, the hierarchy of built walls is challenged by movable furniture to define space. On the other hand, in Chris Marker Residence, cookie-cutter coherence is discarded in favor of self-generated rationality informed by program, site, the color of the sky, and other applicable systems. Notably, Experience imagines housing not as a mechanical repetition of units but as a system of heterogeneous parts akin to a living organism. Across their projects, music emerges as a persistent theme, as the architects draw from the languages of art and music, translating rhythm, variation, and counterpoint into spatial form.