A Conversation with Stéphanie Bru & Alexandre Theriot
By Christian Kerez
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Christian Kerez: How do you work on a project? How do you start from the blank sheet of paper?
Alexandre Theriot: We are always rather sceptical about methodology. Do we really have a methodology? The first challenge is to aggregate different issues, whether they are referential, territorial, related to project management, programmatic, constructive... What is stimulating is to try to federate all these issues into an idea. So in the early stages, we want to preserve a certain disorder so that the range of issues and subjects remains as broad as possible, to explore as many opportunities as possible. There is an all-out search, an abundance. Then it is a question of gathering this disorder through different media.
Stéphanie Bru: More specifically, we start with a programmatic analysis, through organization charts. We always start by working on the more mechanical aspects of the project. That allows us to prepare the formalization of ideas, to build a field that is as broad as possible... to find the small point that will be the subject of the project. Then, more or less in parallel, we work with volume tests. We always follow several tracks that may have nothing to do with each other. Tests of implementation strategies are accumulated, often with models, and generally on a small scale.
AT: Most of the time, we proceed by elimination. We don’t really define any framework, we forbid ourselves from very little in terms of looking for implementation modes. The urban dimension comes first in the way the project is deployed. Then comes the typological issue. But whatever happens, the work on the plan is the cornerstone of the outcome of the projects.
SB: What about you, Christian? How do you start?
We do a lot of research. If we design an art school in Switzerland or a bank in China, we study all the projects in progress, all the projects that have been done, the whole history. We try to understand how things are done in other places. We do a lot of work to understand the brief, the place and the context as well as possible. The better we understand the context &mdashmore cultural and mental than physical&mdash the better we are placed to take a position and make various hypotheses. I draw a lot, I don’t like talking too much with others or listening to what others think, but I really like receiving documents. I like to see plans, illustrations and analyses. We often make models (physical or in 3D on the computer) so that the process is architectural and spatial from the beginning. It is through this enormous series of test models based on different hypotheses that the project can evolve to a final imagination of an architectural space. When we work for 6 weeks on a competition, we work for about 4 weeks on research and concept models and about 2 weeks on the final project.
SB: For us, it is similar. We consider a project as an investigation. We look for clues, we propose things that can lead us to different paths, and at one point we feel that everything fits together. Basically, it is a matter of successfully finding and assembling all the clues that will make up the project.
We are always looking for the particularity of a project. Each program, each place, offers a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity. We always work hard to forget what we have already done, to put aside the experience of the past, to avoid falling into the trap of repetition. The older you get, the longer it takes, but also the more confident we are that we will succeed in forgetting and that we will reach the moment when we find this particularity that will lead to the new project. For me it is always surprising how long it takes to finally see what seems so obvious, what has been lying on the table, waiting to be put forward since the beginning.
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