Please, introduce yourself and your office?

A6A is an architecture office based in Bordeaux composed of four friends. We met at the school of architecture. As students, we created an association that allowed us to participate in ideas competitions and collaborate with practices that needed an extra hand. At school there were five workshops, or ateliers, so we decided to create the sixth: Atelier 6. After our diplomas we naturally continued working together, and the association became A6A (Atelier 6 Architecture).

What comes to your mind, when you think about your diploma project?

The development of the diploma is a unique moment, not only for the intensity and personal energy it requires, but also for the quality of the time invested.

Nowadays, all the system around the architects work contaminates his creativity, pulling down the project. It is very difficult to maintain the strength of the initial idea, and try to preserve its clarity. The diploma has that almost ingenuous form, in which you can explore the project with the only limits that you impose on yourself.

We like to think that the permanent fight that each project demands to take it to the end without losing its essence, translates our will that every project in the office has always to be like a new diploma.

What are your experiences founding A6A and working together as self-employed architects?

Working on our own entails great responsibilities, and a permanent rigor to ensure that the project is always up to the task. We demand a lot from ourselves, and like so many architects, our schedules do not have a clear limit! All this is what allows us to express ourselves, to build a vision of the architecture that we try to define among the four of us.

How would you characterize Bordeaux as a location for architects who want to start their own practice? How is the context of this place influencing your work?

None of us four are from Bordeaux. We met in the first year of school. Since then, despite different personal experiences, this city has become the place where we always return. It is a city that inspires us, due to the radical nature of its heritage. The strength and subtility of the stone constructions, their false homogeneity given by the rhythm of the facades, the proportions of its voids, are part of the urban landscape that we experience every day.

What does your working space look like?

Our office is situated on the ground floor, which gives us a very strong relationship with the street life. The truth is that it is usually quite messy, so once a year we give a party that forces us to put some order!

What is the essence of architecture for you personally?

What remains once you delete everything superfluous. A constant search for timelessness, almost trying to build the ruin in which the project will become.

Your master of architecture?

A Book: Les pierres sauvages, Fernand Pouillon

A Person: Pierre Lajus, a reference of the École Bordelaise, whose work diserves a larger diffusion

A Building: Venices’s Nordic Pavilion, Sverre Fehn

What has to change in the Architecture Industry?

We live in the era of immediacy, but architecture, by definition, is still a process of slow creation, with a vocation to last longer than its authors. In spite of this, the current system forces us to respond to all problems quickly, too quickly, without being able to take the time necessary to develop the best answer. If something has to be changed for us, it is that demand for rapid responses, directing ourselves towards a form of positive slowness that our ancestors had surely more integrated in their way of working.

Tour de Suisse

We witnessed via Instagram that you were travelling through Switzerland. What did you visit? Which buildings did you see? What will last with you?

The idea of ​​doing the Swiss Tour came from the desire that the four of us had to see, walk by and touch all those projects that have fascinated us since we started in architecture. Forget for a few days the architecture blogs, to get into a camping-car and travel thousands of kilometers.

Of course, we wanted to see a lot of Zumthor and to bathe in Vals. We were impressed by his ability to continue to surprise from one project to another, working with the same finesse, but using a different vocabulary. Before this, we immersed ourselves in the concrete architecture of Ticino, through Vacchini, Snozzi and Galfetti, and also looked for more confidential projects, like the Peter Märkli’s Congiunta Museum.

We crossed the Grissons following Olgiati’s works and once in Zürich we could visit several E2A projects we are interested in and meet our friends Igual & Guggenheim. It was a great moment!

We came back with a desire to drive up the level of self-demand, to always look for the detail, and not let us remove the ambition of making good architecture.

At the end of the trip we counted around fifty visits in seven days. We are collecting them in a small publication that we will edit ourselves and share it with anyone who is interested in this journey.

Website: www.atelier6architecture.com

Links: Instagram, Facebook, Divisare

Pictures © A6A

Project Pictures: Agnes Clotis

Interview: kntxtr, 05/2018

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