«Construction is always built on site, by hands, with joy.»
«Construction is always built on site, by hands, with joy.»
«Construction is always built on site, by hands, with joy.»
2m26 is an architecture and construction studio based in Kyoto, Japan and composed by two French architects, Mélanie Heresbach and Sébastien Renauld. We love to build what we design, using our hands, expressing the joy of materials. The belief that architecture is immaterial, makes us exploring performing art, conducting workshops, inviting future users to join construction process. No matter of scale, architecture is always made on site, by hands with joy.
Architecture permits us to link brain and hands, not only dreaming to change reality but build it. A first house for ourselves designed and built during second year of university to experience what is mass, light, how to offer to the sun a playground, how of respect a budget and a timetable. Architecture studies are a beautiful theater but often it forgot what is reality of constructions.
During 10 years in France, we have planned and built under an artist status. After we spent time to study laws, housing regulations – art pieces seemed to be an easier form to hide architecture. No more regulations, no building permits, direct contracts with cities or cultural institutions, but still a legal way to assemble material on site and arguing “long term performing act” for the fact to live in. We learned first how to consider the law as a malleable material, we need to use.
When you build an art piece on the common ground, you have to take full responsibility for it. The fact to construct and to assume it, become the main part of your work. Designing is a game, make sure that the mass you elevate doesn’t fall down is on your own shoulders. With this knowledge, few governmental institutions start to order small scale “art pieces” because it was even easier for them to go out of strict French building laws.
In parallel, our first furniture line was designed and built with house leftovers. It allowed us to establish a trust relationship with future house customers and to obtain structural and economic skills.
Since a bit more than 10 years, we regularly make a long duration performing act in many different cities: The crossing. It consists by building beds, tables and chairs, move it by hand and live on it. Spending almost a year on pavement teaches us as a lot about what is architecture, public space, inhabitant, cites identities. We have crossed many European cities then New York and Tokyo in a raw. Just after the month of Tokyo crossing, we started having small orders in Japan and felt that we can keep learning a lot from this culture.
We have moved our studio to Kyoto and started discovering many new skills, craft, materials. A culture of “the hand”, where daily life objects can be hand made with love by a craft you met for a reasonable price offer us possibilities to better understand connections between humans, climate and construction.
After renovating our Kyoto city house while experiencing with fibers field in architecture, soil walls, lime finishes (mainly humidity catchers), we wanted a new playground to keep experiencing and we moved to an old folk house in the countryside of Kyoto.From that point we discovered how deep the link can be between what you design and what you are harvesting around. Maybe a seasonal architecture starts here.
Preparing wood from trees, collecting bark or pampa grass to make a roof, mixing soil and rice straw to be able to make a wall or a stove, etc. It started to be the first point of how we design and build. At first it is a long conversation with the material itself and a way to maintain the landscape around. Location changes our perception of the fact to construct, the rhythms of it too. Make architecture as a craftsman, slowly with what is around you.
Daily morning fire under the snow, feed horses and clean stable, spending day time outside or in the construction atelier, sketch and talk about the next project anytime, everywhere and reduce computer time to the night or to a rainy day.
Architecture is immaterial, it is about feeling of mass, links between humans, contacts with surroundings.
Construction is always built on site, by hands, with joy. We truly hope that each material enjoys to be prepared, to be set and to be appreciated in a long discussion with sun, winds and rain.
Book/Magazine: Koya to Kura by Ando Kunihiro
Building: The „gas station“ of Eladio Dieste
Mentor/Architect: Tomoaki Uno
Building material: All fiber from wood to straw.
Spatial Memory: How the sun was dancing into the gymnasium of Livio Vacchini
Last year the price of cedar bark became cheaper than plywood, a natural material, harvested by hand, waterproof, alive. Future is now, we can build with better materials than mass industrialization products full of chemicals.
Humans have to take care of traditional skills which were approved by centuries of experience to live with the sorroundings – “milieu”, climate adapted.
We dream about “Tengori”. A grandpa, who is living nearby teached us this forgotten word in a local Japanese dialect, Tengori” is an exchange of time to achieve something, it can be used between humans or between humans and nature.
Stop to talk about it, do it.
Use your hands first, to draw, to build, to experience. Architecture is a body matter not a digital one.
Build your own house. (A few times is better, we have a french legend saying that a human needs to build for himself three houses before he got a good one, we are now building the fifth house for ourselve and we are still learning a lot…)
Hands.
We never stop to go back and forth between the past and the current architecture field. We love to feel where humans, constructions, knowledges come from, which stone was used to create the next one. Architecture is a collective game, you can always catch in a building the question you will try to solve in the next one.
We love Japan for this reason, we exchange project between us, help each other, the Japanese architecture scene is focused everyday on trying to solve the question “how can we live together in a limited word?”. After a financial and an ecological crisis, new energy is born, based on tradition looking for the future.
Actually we study a lot old folks architecture and vernacular constructions.
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
Project 4
Project 5