Pierre Gautier architect

ITINERARY

Pierre Gautier was winner of the 1991 Europan 2 compeition, "Living in the city", teamed with Tania Concko on the Zaanstad site (NL), which culminated in an exemplary urban construction.
He graduated from the Delft Higher Technical School in 1991. Since the competition that represented his crucible, he has worked on the identity between memory and new spaces, and on the permanence and evolution of built fabric. The capacity of a building or a neighbourhood to respond to complex and evolving conditions without losing its character has become one of the decisive conditions governing relevance and longevity. From the urban scale right down to interior layout, this approach provides a way of distinguishing between structure and filinf, lasting and temporary, essential and secondary.
Using the potential strength contained within sites and locations to develop a different urban ort architectural approach, based not on the continuity of a context but on the continuity of its essence.
Pierre gautier has lectured in different architecture schools or techniocal universities in France and the Netherlands (Paris, Delft, Rotterdam, Amsterdam).

IDENTITY

The specificity of the European city is a way of looking at it through the identity of its spaces. This identity is not necessarily to do with heritage. It is built up from the memory of places, their image, in a dialogue between new and old.

St-Jacques de la Lande (F) - Around a primary school

In order to maintain urban and architectural consistency across the plot, interstices are developed in the projects for the school. The different components of the programme and their volumes are ordered in terms of orientation, exposure to the sun, level and proximity to public functions, which allows them to be differentiated into sequences, perspectives, consecutive views and individual itineraries. The use of the landscape, the topography and the ground is the common denominator of the three buildings that make up the school.

SCALES

Reinterpreting a contemporary urban reality and re-establishing links, eradicating the solipsistic mutual unawareness of neighbourhoods.

CHARTRES (F) - New centrality

The objective of the urban project for the park of the district is that it should become the new heart symbolising the identity and unity of the neighbourhood.
The three existing types of urban fabric (detached houses/shopping centre/council blocks) have an autistic relationship to their environment. Only a new type of urban design based on ideas about permanence and change in the built environment, the distinction between structure and infill, lasting and temporary, will be able to create a new identity and nucleus for the district.

ENVIRONMENT

The sites inherited from modern urban planning are often polluted: old ports, industrial areas, landfill sites. They need to be environmental approach to landscaping.

Den Haag (NL) - Housing and ecology

A new public park, containing sports facilities, has been built on the former waste incinerator in the centre of The Hague. The polluted surface of the site has been covered by some two metres of clean earth, forming a park that is higher than the existing public spaces around.
In order to connect the expression and operation of the project with the identity of the new park, the living-rooms are on the first floor, with a view over the park; the same natural stone that makes up the base of the park is used for the podium of the houses.

FLEXIBILITY

Faced with new, shifting social and economic conditions, we need to devise urban spaces and buildings that are flexible in their ability to adapt to evolving uses.

Den Haag (NL) - Diversity and identity

The principles applied in the development of the double plot at Morgenstond-Midden represent a combination of urban and rural qualities of life.
The contrast between the hierarchically organised public spaces and the monotonous existing buildings has been resolved in favour of hierarchy and variation. The new buildings to fulfil these criteria adapt their structure to match the existing, adjoining urban space and each typology will have its own architectural expression.

Europan Generation, The reinterpreted city Catalogue
Editions: Cité de l’architecture and Europan, May 2007
224 colour pages, bilingual English/French


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