a+u 2025:12
Content
Feature: Experience
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. (a+u)
Essay:
Unfinished Acts
Ahmed Belkhodja
Museum, Show Room, Home
House for a Collector
Axonometric Gangways
Housing, Nursery, and Dojo
Geometric Anthill
Berthelot Collective Housing
Anti-Organic Unity
Palaiseau Student Housing
Natural Light Bigness
National Museum of Art
Systemic Variations
Chris Marker Residence
Flying Carpets School
Verdeaux School Complex
Landscape Propeller
Office Building
Anti-Monument for Robert Smithson
Center for Ancient and Contemporary Music
Space as Thought
Economy of Means, Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Chronoplan
Wolf Collective Housing
Essay:
Chronoplan
Tristan Chadney, Laurent Esmilaire, Éric Lapierre
Built Model
Le Point du Jour Art Center and Publishers
What Reality? What Fiction?
Migaux Student Housing
Optic Machines Homes
Pirmil Collective Housing
Collective Scale
Refurbishment of a Grand Ensemble
Seemingly Useless
Fondeyre Urban Logistics Facility
Typological Dynamic
Flora Terrace Housing
Clashed Memories
Vives Eaux Lock Houses
Reading Raft
Vacation Home
Conversation:
From Experience to Experiment and Back Again
Tristan Chadney, Laurent Esmilaire, Sharon Johnston, Éric Lapierre,
and Mark Lee