ARCH+ FEATURES 25:
Hardcore Architecture

Éric Lapierre of Eric Lapierre Architecture and Thomas Raynaud of BuildingBuilding belong to a new generation of architects that has returned to core questions of the discipline. They re-emphasize the intellectual potency of form. Thereby they take up a traditional historical lineage that championed architecture's inherent autonomy – a break from decades of architectural discourse dominated by sociology and technology. Lapierre's and Raynaud's focus on form and its impacts on urban contexts draws from the work of Oswalt Mathias Unger, Aldo Rossi, and Robert Venturi, who initiated an important critique of modernism in the early 1960s. The evening's program includes presentations by each, and a discussion between them, exhibiting these new practioners' interests.