The ethos of this unusually discreet starchitect, one half of French practice Lacaton & Vassal, is both frugal and generous, a shining light in the climate emergencyAnne Lacaton is the recipient of the Jane Drew Prize for Architecture 2025, part of the 2025 W Awards. Read the full announcementIt is a warm and empty space overlooking the North Sea. In the distance, the cranes of the citys industrial harbour look like toys, and container ships as long as the Eiffel Tower fit within the palms of childrens hands. On the covered terrrace at the top of the FRAC Grand Large, the regional collection of contemporary art for the North of France, there is no work on display; no curation; no programming. Yet this is the museums most popular space. Visitors often locals loiter after a demanding meander through highbrow conceptual art in whitecubestyle temperaturecontrolled rooms. They watch the fastchanging shades of the landscape, the steelworks torch, the beach vanishing on the horizon. Nested under the buildings pitched roof, this vast, alltransparent hall makes an impression on visitors but does not crush them. It is welcoming, accessible and playful. Serving no obvious purpose, it is redundant and therefore luxurious. Like most of the work of Anne Lacaton and JeanPhilippe Vassal, this extra space at Dunkirks FRAC makes sense of oxymoronic associations: cheap and deluxe, visionary and downtoearth, modest and ambitious.The couple is a unit both in work and life. In no way can I speak only for myself, starts Lacaton. Its a joint effort. In France, we simply refer to lacatonvassal, fusing their names to form a mythical architectural figure. Shedding light on one half of a tightknit pair is perilous.Originally from the south-west of France, Anne Lacaton moved to Paris with her partner Jean-Philippe Vassal when they began working on the Palais de Tokyo. Their office is now just outside the Priphrique, in MontreuilCredit:Bruno LevyBorn in 1955 in SaintPardouxlaRivire, a town of little more than a thousand souls in rural Dordogne, Lacaton graduated from ENSAP Bordeaux, the nearest school of architecture, in 1980. She continued with a postgraduate degree in urban planning and, in 1987, cofounded Lacaton & Vassal with her partner, a year her senior, whom she had met while studying. That is it. Upbringing? Life story? Family? Favourite colour? Lacaton does not even have a page on French Wikipedia; neither does Vassal. When they won the Pritzker Prize in 2021, the Guardian called them an unflashy French duo. While most prominent (male) architects in France produce countless books, speak for hours on end on national radio about how they became architects, their relationship to wine, fame and their genitals (Rudy Ricciotti), there is impeccable dignity in Lacatons public presence. Not everything, says Lacaton, needs to be shared and explained. Both in their architecture and in their public personae, Lacaton and Vassal are modest yet courageous and innovative.Their first built project was Maison Latapie, in Floirac, a suburban town adjacent to Bordeaux. Delivered in 1993, it was not what the Latapie family had in mind when they reached out to the young practice. They had initially envisioned constructing a standard catalogue home of 6570m2, based on their budget. Since the plot of land they had bought did not fit the standard home, they needed an architect to adapt it. Lacaton and Vassal quickly opened new horizons, away from standardisation. We tried to understand their dreams, how they wanted to live, says Lacaton. The client had a camper van which they would drive south, to the beaches near Seville. They said the best moment was when they parked the vehicle and took out the table, served lunch or dinner at the seaside or slept under a starry sky. It was a beautiful understanding of living, and reminded the architects of the nomadic way of life they had discovered during travels in Africa.The 2004 manifesto Plus, articulates the idea of doing more with less: never demolishing, removing or replacing, butalways adding, transforming and reusingCredit:Druot, Lacaton & VassalLacaton and Vassal have a longstanding interest in the greenhouses that dot the landscapes of the countryside around Bordeaux, but also in the architecture of hot climates beyond France. After their studies, Lacaton regularly visited Vassal in Niger, where he worked at the urban planning department of Niamey in lieu of national service. Design elements from the nomadic architecture they admired came to influence their work and way of thinking: a striving for construction that is lightweight, modular and economical. When the Latapie family reached out for help, the duo easily convinced them to throw away the catalogue home and embark on an unconventional journey that would end up doubling the surface area of the house while remaining within their modest budget, equivalent to 55,000 today.The family home is based on a very simple twostorey rectangular volume, made from a metal frame and wood panelling. To the west, the street facade is opaque, clad in sheeting of fibre cement. To the back, another volume of the same size but made of transparent polycarbonate extends into the garden, effectively doubling the liveable surface area at 185m2, the home is three times larger than the clients original request. Like the top floor of Dunkirks FRAC, this winter garden is an extra space, a room that was not part of the initial programme and that becomes a playful space of freedom for both designers and client. As it faces east, the winter garden receives the first beams of sun in the morning and remains a warm, inhabitable space throughout the day, but its large openings can be closed or left ajar by inhabitants. The materials are modest and the overall construction low cost, but the design feels seamless and the space generous. We came to think that the ideal would be a 1:1 proportion between the extra and the programmed, Lacaton reflects. Since then, in every project weve done, weve included additional space in roughly this proportion.Transparent polycarbonate sheeting would become one of Lacaton & Vassals signature materials and critics have pointed to the poor recycling potential of this plastic polymer. Lacaton does not dodge the question: Theres still a lot of work to be done to improve the sustainability of any material we might use. With less than a millimetre of thickness, polycarbonate represents only a small quantity of what goes into a structure, and its lifespan is much longer than that of many insulated claddings, which often degrade rapidly. When he put the property on the market recently (asking price 580,000), the Latapie house owner decided to replace the polycarbonate sheets because they had lost their transparency but they were not structurally degraded.Seven years later, Lacaton and Vassal left Bordeaux for Paris national newspaper Le Monde compared them at the time to two sturgeons who had swum up to the capital city and temporarily relocated their office inside one of their largest projects to date: the retrofitting of the Palais de Tokyo. Despite its location in one of the poshest and sleepiest neighbourhoods of the city, the Palais de Tokyo quickly became one of the most hyped art centres in Paris. Lacaton & Vassals work came in two phases: 7,800m2 at the turn of the millennium and another 16,500m2 a decade later. Before their interventions, the 1937 art deco building was in the process of being redeveloped into a centre dedicated to film; the project collapsed and, overnight, all construction workers vacated the site, leaving behind what Lacaton remembers as a ruin. Having won the competition for a new contemporary art centre, Lacaton & Vassal inherited the abandoned construction site.The 16 million budget of the Palais de Tokyo might seem a far cry from the modest Latapie family house, and yet the essence remains the same: an economy of means and an effort to work with what is already there while leaving room for the unprogrammed. Designwise, they limited retrofitting to a minimum: they secured the structure and fluidified circulation by building a new staircase, for example, but left the walls in the rough state they had found them. They approached the site as a void to be repeatedly filled and emptied in Lacatons words, to leave maximum freedom to the artistic practices that would temporarily occupy it. The architects regret that todays management tries to fill these voids too much with permanent programming restaurants, a bookshop and polished white walls as if they were scared by undefined spaces, says Lacaton. But luckily, adds Vassal, the Palais de Tokyo is too big to be totally filled. Designers lamenting their clients decisions is classic of (st)architecture, but here it feels different; they regret the lack of ambition, and would prefer to see the idea that created meaning for the project being upheld.Lacaton and Vassal went from delivering private houses to flagship cultural buildings in Paris, Dunkirk and Lille, as well as university campuses in Bordeaux and Grenoble. In Nantes, they designed a large and luminous architecture school, with open concrete floors that can be appropriated by the students, teachers and staff according to their needs. It was a competition they won while camping in the Palais de Tokyo: The intimate, physical experience of that space shifted our approach to architecture into another dimension. Inside the Palais de Tokyo, we couldnt think small, says Vassal.Yet the practice truly made its mark on the global scene with the radical retrofitting of social housing blocks in Paris and Bordeaux. Highrises and their horizontal counterparts, the barres, that were built cheaply and in haste to address the severe housing shortage after the Second World War, are the most unloved typologies of French architecture. The Tour BoislePrtre, which stands by the ring road on the edge of Paris, is one of them. The City under a new Socialist mayor had decided against demolishing the tower, originally designed by Raymond Lopez in 1961, to instead fund an ambitious renovation of its 96 units. In collaboration with Frdric Druot, with whom they had published their Plus manifesto in 2004, Lacaton and Vassal won the competition with a radical proposal. The cladding put up in the 80s was removed and replaced by glazed sliding doors that open onto 2mdeep winter gardens encased in polycarbonate, and additional 1mdeep balconies around the tower perimeter. The combination of large openings with sunblocking and thermal curtains helps regulate temperature, warming or cooling the interior according to season and time of day. The winter gardens added 3,560m2 to the existing 8,900m2, increasing the size of each apartment by an average 36m2 while giving the tower a fresh and appealing look.Despite the current preference among architects to avoid demolition in favour of rehabilitation, Lacaton is cautious, if not pessimistic. Progress is too slow. Statistics on destruction remain appalling and what is lost is lost forever, she laments. We know we can do it. Its not that difficult, it doesnt cost more, and were running out of time. Lacaton does not conceal the initial struggle to make clients, partners and publicsector backers believe in the viability, affordability and longterm thermal performance of their designs. Tour BoislePrtre and projects like it have vindicated their approach. But they have also recently published a largescale appraisal of their building technique in Its Nice Today an unusual move for starchitects.If you want an encapsulation of Lacaton and Vassals approach, it remains the Lon Aucoc square in Bordeaux. In 1996, the City commissioned the duo to upgrade a public square. The design they submitted? Do nothing. Prune the trees, redo the gravel, clean more often. Voil. The square, argued Lacaton and Vassal, is perfect as it is.In Dunkirks harbour, Lacaton & Vassal left theoriginal boat shed AP2 untouched, to preserve its exceptional volume and potential for uses, and created itsmodern and lightweight twin (left). Asapair, they became theFRAC Grand Large in2015. While most of thenew volume is clad in polycarbonate panels, the architects used air-filled cushions in ETFE sheeting for the top floor, which offers striking views over the harbourCredit:Philippe Ruault