Lecture Response: Less Is Enough

Response to Anne Lacaton: “Principles of Optimism”

No dreams of mass timber cities, no studies of mycelium bricks, no statistics of energy-recovery ventilators could ever come close to the vision of sustainability that Anne Lacaton gave us on a mid-January Friday.

That is precisely because she does not frame the work of Lacaton & Vassal in terms of sustainability, a word so ubiquitous it often rings hollow. Instead, she presented four decades of projects with startling unity, bound as they were by a few timeless ecological principles: economy as a tool of freedom; the generosity of unprogrammed space; seeing values before seeing problems; and improving lives above improving buildings. The result was the distillation of a radically simple architecture based on understanding as much as possible to act as little as necessary. In so many ways, what we already have is enough, and the best thing an architect can do is help us see that.

The clarity of her lecture and of her career earned Lacaton the license to conclude with a sentiment so sappy it should have been cringe, but delivered with such earnest force that I replayed the recording several times to transcribe the words verbatim:

“When you have counted the trees, when you have named the trees, when you have visited the houses—you love them. And then you work very differently.”