The question of joy is essential to us, how to intensify everyday life with almost nothing, such as opening a window, drawing a curtain, sitting somewhere. In housing—which is a very difficult typology—we work a lot on these moments. Bathing in the sun or cooking in front of a window are very ordinary situations that can become very powerful if the space supports them. Glass, for example, is very present in our projects. This is not out of material fascination, but for its capacity to extend space and to bring the outside inside. Ultimately, intensity comes from that: from the superposition of uses, temporalities, but also from these micro-experiences of everyday life.
Finally, then, there is that moment when the project escapes us and it starts to live on its own. To intensify is not to add, it is to open. It is to make a space capable of producing more than what we had imagined.
Rail: You call housing the most difficult typology. You take that difficulty, the burden of the non-existent user, the unknown user, the market economy, the speculative interior, and project it onto all of your work. An unknown inhabitant might always be present in a speculative interior. There’s always a non-precise user behind your highly precise building.
Bruther: Yes! And that’s a good thing! As soon as you try to define the user, you simplify them. You imagine someone who behaves exactly as planned and the project becomes poor. In reality, a user is elusive. They can be multiple, unpredictable, sometimes even the opposite of what we imagined. So, we prefer to work with this uncertainty, to carry it with us, and to let it pass through the project. This is exactly what allows spaces to remain open and truly appropriated.
Rail: I get the sense that if you designed a house for yourself, it would have a lot of unknown functions and very open, undescribed space.
Bruther: That would be difficult, because we don’t really like houses. We’ve never really wanted to live in one—except maybe those by Terunobu Fujimori, which are almost like fictions. The house, in general, is a very defined object, very stabilized, almost too much. We are more interested in open, collective situations that can evolve. So if we had to design a house, we would probably try not to make one at all, or at least to make it open enough so that it can become something other than what it is supposed to be.
Rail: Your buildings are all very beautiful, and they operate as an exercise in image-making even before they’re built. The fact that they renamed the Caen research center based on your aesthetic aims is notable, because I think you’ve had a part of your success within the architecture world through this incredible, seductive image of architecture. It’s generated quite a lot of attention. Can you describe this romantic image of the high-tech that is so prevalent?
Bruther: Yes. But what interests us is not so much the image itself, but what it produces. If our projects generate strong images, it’s probably because they are quite readable. You can almost understand them immediately and take them apart mentally, like an engine, to see how things are assembled and how they hold together. There is something slightly mechanical in that approach: an assembly that is sometimes strange, not entirely rational, but still understandable. And at the same time, we hope it doesn’t stop there. These assemblies also produce something more, which is a capacity to suggest and to open interpretations. A strong architecture, for us, is something very clear but that never says everything.
Rail: For this, you produce images in a very strong, particular way. How do you think of the images in your own practice of work?
Bruther: The image is a result, not an objective, and it comes quite late in the process. It derives from a method, and from a way of constructing the project in a broader sense. We try to avoid direct aesthetic judgments as much as possible, because that’s often where things freeze. Instead, we work through narration. The narrative is a thread, like a lever that connects very different elements of the building together. Ultimately, the image of the work appears at the end, as a consequence of that process. It’s not something we aim to produce, it’s something that emerges.
Rail: Architecture didn’t always think about style. And now, if we find one, there is an impulse to do everything to undo it, and to work differently. If a style emerges from a practice very suddenly, I think that’s maybe the worst thing you can say about a practice.
Bruther: Style in architecture… We should probably not care about it. And at the same time, it remains fascinating. It can be seductive, radical, almost addictive. But today, it becomes obsolete the moment it appears. Style works in fashion. In architecture, it’s more problematic, because architecture lasts. So we need to be cautious about it. But at the same time, we can’t ignore its cultural power. Today, we are somewhere else. We are in hybridity, in impurity, in unstable forms. And that is probably more interesting than style itself.