Since their start in 1987, the Paris based agency of Pierre du Besset and Dominique Lyon has grown to the prominent place they have on the architectural scene today. A presence gained through leading realisations, but equally because of their caustic writings, clear positions in the architectural debate and innovating competition projects, shown on exhibitions in France and abroad.
This destiny to become a mediatised agency is well illustrated by the fact that their first realisation in 1987, the conversion of an industrial construction in the Parc de la Villette, Paris, into an exhibition space , received a prize for the best first work by young architects. Fifteen years later, their, at that moment, most far-reaching and ambitious building, the Troyes Library, earned the "Equerre d'Argent" award in 2002 . This unambiguous recognition from the architectural profession is an award for the intransigent manner in which Pierre du Besset and Dominique Lyon remain faithful to Architecture as an ideal, an art form. Concretely that means: remaining dedicated to strong, diverse architectural proposals, composed as the best answers to complex environments and programmes. "Risk taking", says Dominique Lyon, "has always been a natural awareness in the agency : we have never softened down our projects in order to try to ‘please’ jury’s to maybe get a building realised". In this way, Du Besset & Lyon have over the last two decades realised libraries, offices, flats and industrial buildings that have a prominent presence in their environments and draw immediately our attention. The agency most often interferes in recent metropolitan environments, where conflicts and contradictions add to the challenge to find right formal answers. But a building like the Monde office (1990) as well as their recent UNALCO project (2004) in the inner-city of Paris, show their ability to give contemporary answers in preserved historic urban tissues like that of Paris, without falling back on neo-historic or post-modern styles.

Underlying method

When one looks at the realisations of Pierre du Besset and Dominique Lyon, one notes that the buildings are heterogeneous, there does not seem to be a style or one approach that formed them. However, a nearer study reveals that a consistent strategy and working method lay behind the projects that, as programmes and environments alter on each occasion, results in dissimilar buildings. When through interviews, I first discovered their attitude, for the library projects of Almere (Holland) and in Troyes (France), I was struck by their Cartisan analytic approach of aspects concerning the buildings, the programme and the environment. Answers so obtained were later combined with quite personal observations or encountered coincidences that finally would result in a form that was a precise response to programmatic needs, satisfying as architectural answer and always solidly present on the location. An architect who has a similar, almost painstaking "question – answer" approach, is Toyo Ito. Therefore it is no coincidence that the high-tech façade of Toyo Ito’s Paris hospital, currently under construction, is in many ways close to the Monde-office building of du Besset & Lyon in a similar haussmannian street nearby. Indeed, these architects have a shared, objective attitude towards urban environments, talk about trivial images that trigger project forms, use fine steel frames and transparent glass skins to ‘blur’ frontiers between buildings and their environment, design clear ground plans and have a similar, delicate attention to the choice of materials.

Cheerful triviality

Another aspect in the work of Du Besset & Lyon is that they, in their own words: "search for something that is ‘cheerful’ in the given environments". That means a capacity to take advantage of unfavourable situations, by re-using urban realities in a new, unexpected way. Already in their first work, the Maison de la Villette, mirrors hung at the roof on the inside cleverly introduced images of the city environment into the building. Another example: Du Besset & Lyon said they were "delighted" to be able to build the Troyes library behind a Mac Donald drive-in, because it gave them the opportunity to demonstrate that as architects they could with similar means do better than this commercial icon. By the scale – enormous - the colours – bright - and the proven attraction to the public, the library has "absorbed" the Mac Donald’s standing in front of it. This award winning building is an illustration of how architecture can transform urban aspects - that too rapidly are considered as "negative" - into constructive architectural components. The faculty to transform banal urban triviality into meaningful architectural signs has been one of the constant, original characteristics of the agency’s work.

Cinematographic dimension

In a similar way, urban situations like busy main roads (Orleans library and Lyon library project) or narrow inner-city streets (Paris, Monde-office, Mediathèque Lisieux) are not only taken account of, but even used to reinforce projects. In Orleans the façade of the main study hall opens theatrically, as a balcony, onto the motorway, turning passing traffic into a show, pleasant to watch. This practice of the makers, to first observe banal modern life as something truly worthwhile, and than have users of buildings, through a designed scenography, shared this observation with them, has an obvious cinematographic dimension. The way the Orleans Library opens onto the passing traffic, immediately brings in mind Jacques Tati’s famous film Playtime (1966). That film once opened our eyes to the random beauty of modern traffic and movement, and could only have been made with a neutral, slightly amused observation of ordinary life, that is shared by this agency. In a similar way, in the Lisieux Library this ‘visual directing’, gives the sitting readers a special view, and by that an indispensable distance, on the commercial feverous activity, seen unusually, and quite amusingly, from below.

The filter and the view

These examples bring us to a constant characteristic in Du Besset & Lyon’s architecture: visual relationships between the building and the environment are unusually sharply designed. This means that where some architects stop their efforts, because they would count on the fact that urban relationships will grow spontaneously – which they hardly do – Du Besset & Lyon’s extend their task in order to foresee – again as a scriptwriter would scrupulously do with his characters - the quality of the possible interactions between the building (the user) and the surrounding environment (the passer-by). In many projects, the way the building would be seen by car drivers, pedestrians and neighbours, has defined orientations, materials of façades, heights of the building or shapes of rooflines.
In the same way, the architects have mentioned that they "filter" or "slightly distort" the visual relation between the user of their buildings and the city landscape, the way one sees the world different when wearing coloured sunglasses. In the Troyes library, an extra blue skin, suspended as a gigantic, 100 meters long, stained glass window on the outside of the building, changes the view readers have of the city, a scene that is now always happily coloured, as eternally blue as the Californian sky Dominique Lyon got to know when working in L.A. with Frank Gehry. Metal undulating strips animate the façade of the Orleans library, whereas on the inside these strips protect the reader, and soften the city view. These more and more inventive ways to control, by carefully designing a complex skin, the visual relation between city and buildings, has reached its most sophisticated expression with the concave façade of the library project in Lyon. The project is set between highways and flats, the kind of urban realities that ask for strong answers. In Du Besset & Lyon’s project, the concave façade of the building has a changing deep sea green to bright green colour. In reality the inner wall reflects in horizontal aluminium strips, positioned behind the glass skin, functioning as mirrors, strangely doubling the image seen from passing cars on the highway outside, and giving a 100 % sun protection to the users inside.

Undeniable manifestations

In these examples one can notice a "directing" of buildings, as if they were actors, playing their role on the urban scene. In the same way, on the inside of buildings, Du Besset & Lyon often create, with architectural means, special atmospheres to appeal to the public. "In order to attract young users to public buildings as libraries, those have to be, in these times of shopping malls, more spectacular and attractive than the commercial buildings", says Dominique Lyon. Thus, the ceiling of the library in Troyes is made of gilded, metallic waves, spectacular but never too impressive, creating a space where one feels eager to sit and study. A similar coloured ceiling was proposed for the Luxemburg Library project, and in Orleans inner hallways are painted in a bright orange colour, just as the glass skins of the Almere and other library projects. For the Tokyo French Embassy, the yellow and red coloured façades refer to a certain French tradition, the "taste for colour", we also see in the Paris fashion scene. This project has elongated, pure forms, is put on pillars, has a central entrance on ground level, long uninterrupted windows and not a blending, but a reflecting relation with the garden around and under it. Indeed, in its formal characteristics it seems a homage to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie, about which Dominique Lyon wrote: "it is floating [...] the villa is not in the nature, it is with the nature, at its very level: that of the undeniable manifestations". In their Tokyo project, Du Besset & Lyon thus propose a brightly coloured version of modernism; it has no longer its sternness, but still the efficiency, combined with the cheerful legacy of pop art. Indeed, the close relation with design and Contemporary art is present in many of Du Besset & Lyon’s works. Like in the Rungis mediatheque, where as architectural intervention they placed a sort of enormous "ready-made" in an existing hall. The form looks like a re-use of a plastic swimming pool, but it is really a library department of 250 square meters, that is in some ways close to the polyester works of the Dutch artist Joep Van Lieshout.

How specific becomes general

The master plan "Gran Horizonte" is a utopian "happy suburb", made for an exhibition in 2001. A form of criticism of the hardly satisfying, carpet spread French suburbs with their conventional building forms. Du Besset & Lyon give this half-serious architectural recipe for a better residential life: "get rid of hierarchies, ignore false appearances, resolve contradictions, and go for performance". In their view, the houses should occupy the entire plots, the gardens occupy the whole roofs, solid walls for ever distance neighbours and this all together makes a landscape, satisfying to contemplate from the roof gardens and from cars, lost, seeking theirs ways in the now created labyrinths. With humour, but the question is posed: How does an architect cope with the architectural mediocrity of suburbs? Du Besset & Lyon wrote about these zones: "they are to urbanism what the soap opera is to cinema: a form of laxness". When we look at their projects, they have found the answer to that question and know how to cope with shoddy contexts. It’s because they first embrace that what is specific to a given situation, a method opposed to a general approach that only gives clichés... or carpet suburbs. Dominique Lyon, in order to clarify his position, often cites William Faulkner. The writer concentrated on a small region, a village, even a tribe, so godlike known and described, that by that, the stories from it got a universal, general meaning. This is also what the architecture of Pierre Besset and Dominique Lyon tells us: stay very close to a given situation. Explore it. Forget all the clichés and observe the context intimately, like a scientist. Give formal answers to the thus obtained information, and then your building will inform about the context, about you, and about your time. Like Faulkner’s writing, if buildings are locally defined, specific precise answers, they can get a universal, general impact. This also means an architect is never finished, all has to be questioned always, on each occasion. "Architecture nowadays", says Dominique Lyon, "is lost, and you have to win it back each time again".

© Steven Wassenaar