Openings

This book brings together twenty-nine projects from the past ten years, both completed and ongoing, designed by Paris-based h2o architectes. Arranged in thematic categories that stem from the firm’s singular approach to design and architecture, the projects vary greatly in type, scale, and individual context, including housing developments in Paris, a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, a temporary school pavilion, a timber construction for a vineyard, the rehabilitation of Paris’s Museum of Modern Art, and other large public spaces.

h2o architectes’ proposals are united by an approach that is always both radical and sensitive, an ethos that emerges here from interviews conducted by architect and writer Fanny Léglise, while essays by architect and anthropologist Miguel Mazeri and architect Bernard Tschumi shed light on various aspects of the firm’s practice, vision, and philosophy.

The book also features poems by French writer and poet Frédéric Forte, composed in situ at several of h2o architectes’ building sites. Photographs, renderings, and plans round out this first comprehensive volume on one of France’s leading up-and-coming architecture firms.