Patrick Arotcharen and his team shaped their practices in the peri-urban areas of the Basque Country (south-west France), which are marked by a hilly terrain, intense vegetation and a temperate climate. This relationship with the geographical context has profoundly influenced their research into new relationships between architecture and nature, town and country. This friction between the urban and the rural also raises the cultural question of the vernacular and modernity; they have chosen to deal with it by introducing notions of heritage and crossbreeding in a territory marked by its strong identity and its status as a land of welcome that the sea baths, water sports and the ports of Bayonne and Saint Jean de Luz have given rise to. Their interpretation of the archetypal Labourdine farmhouse, the epitome of Basque architecture, combines the mineral mass with the wooden framework that structures the cob walls and roofs. They feel they are heirs to this culture of masonry and framework.
Neither concept, nor dogmatism, nor abstraction: our work is at the crossroads of research and iterative experimentation, which charges architecture with restoring a dual relationship of trust and proximity between man and his environment.
The agency thus questions the capacity of architecture to create a place; it invents a spatial and social contract that rehabilitates contact with the natural elements in order to bring out other forms of living together in a world that is as complex as it is fragile.
