A house is the simple topic of this studio. A matter of simple complexity.

The first part of the year is about learning about a house. The second part is about making your own house. Learning about a house is learning about architecture.

AMBITION

Studio jo taillieu – LIF composes with the idea of the reference, your personal frame of reference but also its place within architectural practice. The studio teaches a methodology of composition and constructing architecture based from the small scale, the detail, towards the bigger scale, the whole. It allows to understand how a detail can give qualities to a space as much as a whole constructive system for a whole building.

Observation, contemplation are key rather than analysing. Imagination rather than concept. These attitudes are part of the studio methodology. This studio believes strongly in the variety of media: from handmade drawing, crafted modeling to digital and analog drawings. Medium are not only a result but rather an ongoing method to think, compose and conceive your architectural intervention. Your hand is a tool, an instrument on the table to conceive your vision. A studio where we take your pleasure for architecture seriously.

MOVEMENT I

exercise in duo

LEARNING ABOUT A HOUSE MAKING YOUR OWN HOUSE

The first part of the year is about learning about a house. You will choose one house among a list of references to work on. But then, disaster strikes. A part of the house collapses. What will you do? You are the master of collapsing. Working in pairs, you will reconstruct your own fragment, rebuilding within and among the ruins left by the catastrophe.

It will be a FRAGMENT of the collapsed reference house built by a composition of constructive elements.

 

See the student’s work for Movement I, Fall semester 2025

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MOVEMENT II

Exercise in duos

Second part is about making your house. Find opportunities where there is no evidence. Where you normally don’t built, there you will make your own house. You will have to choose among 8 locations at first (one location per 4 people, per 2 duos). Then, you will start building your house (one house per duo) in this location taken into account all of what you learned in terms of construction, structure and composition in the previous semester to apply it to the bigger scale : A HOUSE.

It is about living. About construction, structure, about making.
The question of dealing in an existing context will be tackled and how as an architect can we implement our intervention in it, here, one compact house. The goal will be to define a relationship between the site and the house, formulate it by the design choices. Analyzing the existing context and its qualities and then composes and position yourself in it. One house for two students in pairs.

See the student’s work for Movement I, Spring semester 2026