LAN Architecture: Traces

In Traces, an elegant and heavyweight book, the Paris-based studio LAN Architecture celebrates and documentes ten years of its journey into the architectural world.

LAN Architecture, Traces, Barcelona, Actar, 2013, pp. 623

“This profession will never bring you peace.” With these words, French architect Jean Nouvel expresses the essential beauty and yet problematic status of being an architect – a paradox clearly underlying the present book by LAN.

While passionate, the “architect” is often interweaving pleasure and work, in a continuum that embodies an idiosyncratic appetite for life. This almost inevitable condition is what best encapsulates the essence of Traces, the recently published 623 pages book by LAN Architecture: an alternation of short reflective narratives, that unfold through a variety of urban experiences, as well as more informative project or thematic based sections. In other words, a refreshing exercise in the genre that is the architect’s monograph.

But is the architect’s monograph really a genre in itself? If Le Corbusier reinvented the category in 1923 with Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), many have, before and after him, also put their writing skills at the service of similarly delicate operations of self promotion. In Raisons d’écrire. Livres d’architectes, 1945-1999, a book published in 2013, Pierre Chabard and Marilena Kourniati question the reasons that drive architects to write, while wondering to which extent architecture may lie beyond building and within the book (See Pierre Chabard and Marilena Kourniati, Raisons d'écrire - Livres d'architectes (1945-1999), Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2013). Examining work such as Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Steve Izenour, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1968), Aldo Rossi’s L’Architettura della Città (1966), or even MVRDV’s Metacity/Datatown (1999), essays in this edited volume wonder how, by privileging the articulation between text and image, and between discourse and journey, architects’ monographs are fundamentally different from other printed forms.

Another architectural tradition has historically been interlaced with that of the architect’s book: the Grand Tour. It is well known that the Grand Tour, the traditional trip across Europe popular since the seventeenth century, was an educational rite of passage for well-off Europeans. The tradition ceased with the advent of large-scale rail transit and now, in the age of Ryanair, young Europeans can break up their touring into numerous shorter air trips. Yet it is this tradition that emanates from the pages of Traces, albeit the tour being blurred and scattered into a certain disorder.

LAN Architecture, Traces, Barcelona, Actar, 2013, pp. 623

LAN (or Local Architecture Network), a Paris based office founded in 2002 by French Benoît Jallon (1972) and Italian Umberto Napolitano (1975) has built its reputation over the years with projects such as the rue Pajol student residence in Paris’ 18th arrondissement (2007); the EDF archives Centre in Bure, France (2008); the Neue Hamburger Terrassen in Germany (2009); or the gymnasium and public square in Chelles, just outside Paris (2012). More recently, they won the very prestigious architectural competition for the restructuring and extension of the Grand Palais on the Champs Elysées. Somehow representing the so-called “Erasmus” generation, LAN (featured in the 2013-2014 exhibition “Erasmus Effect” curated by Pippo Ciorra at the MAXXI in Rome) has now reached the end of a first cycle of existence, and thus felt the need to “describe architecture as [they] practice it, namely as a collaborative effort, where each person’s ideas and experiences form part of [a] shared vision and designs.”

For LAN, the city is both the starting point and the arrival of architecture. This is clearly perceptible in the inner organisation of the book, alternating between straight order and creative chaos. Not a project catalogue, Traces is a collection of disconnected episodes. “Everything now has to be defined according to keywords, which are traces that we must follow”, announces Napolitano in the first section of the book. A beautiful object, Traces is constituted by rhythmically alternating white and black “notebooks”. The white ones contain writings, reflections, and observations, and constitute a collection of short essays holding the names of the cities that gave rise to them (from Barcelona to Moscow, Istanbul, Rome, Porto, Beyrouth and Helsinki and through Athene, Dublin, Capri, Rotterdam and Fribourg) presenting a succession of questions and hypotheses. The black ones, on the other hand, are more closely related to LAN’s projects and research, yet presented in many original ways (via themes such as density, architecture & power, urban objects, climat, etc). No chronological or geographical order, just the square regularity of the black and white chequer pattern. This begins to disintegrate only towards the end of the book with a chapter dedicated, not to a real city but to “The City of H” and presenting H, a poetic science-fiction novel produced as Napolitano and Jallon’s diploma project, and the founding act of LAN.

This book bears a very personal tone. It is through the voice of Napolitano that the succession of cities are narrated, a voice that might sometimes seems a little too intimate and thus at time disturbing. Well aware of this slightly narcissistic modus operandi, Napolitano – before taking us by the hand through a series of mundane dinners, conferences, and competitions – starts by admitting that everyone likes seeing their name on the cover of a book. Yet despite this golden thread, through the pages of the book a myriad of fascinating themes and ideas are approached: the fragmented city, the importance of communication, architectural photography, teaching, and even Italy (via Roberto Saviano’s writings and the Mozzarella di Bufala).

In terms of content, Traces should be judged as an heterogeneous ensemble. While in terms of form, it must be seen as a statement: an almost scandalously big object for today’s dematerialised world. And so it doesn't come as a surprise that LAN has chosen Actar, the Catalan publisher made famous during the early 2000s for producing beautiful object-books such as Rem Koolhaas’ Mutations (2001), Beatriz Colomina’s Domesticity at War (2006) or the Verb Boogazine and monograph series. And like other Actar titles, Traces is many things at once: a collection of essays, an extended resume, a photo album, a project archive and portfolio, a retrospective diary, a critique of our contemporary condition, etc. Despite a certain tendency of self-promotional communication strategy, Traces is an enjoyable testimony and a lucid introduction to a world that is at once strange, difficult, and enchanting.
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LAN Architecture: Traces

In Traces, an elegant and heavyweight book, the Paris-based studio LAN Architecture celebrates and documentes ten years of its journey into the architectural world.

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