French architect and pedagogue Éric Lapierre from the studio Experience, together with his guest Ahmed Belkhodja, the founder of the Portuguese atelier fala, present non-traditional approaches of these two experimental studies. The dialogue was held together with the Experience founders Tristan Chadney and Laurent Esmilaire.
Éric Lapierre / Experience
Éric Lapierre is a French architect, theorist, curator, writer and founder of the studio Experience in Paris. In addition to his architectural practice, he also lectures at the French ÉPFL, École d’architecture de la ville & des territoires Paris-Est and is a hosting professor at Harvard. In his work, he focuses on theoretical problems, which, in his opinion, are the only way to keep architecture alive as a means of high culture in the current conditions of today. Since 2000, he has been regularly publishing texts on architecture. He published, for example, a guide to Parisian architecture (1900–2008) and the book Architecture of the Real (Le Moniteur, Paris, 2003). In 2019 he was one of the curators of the Triennial of Architecture in Lisbon. His notable buildings include the Le Point du Jour art center in Cherbourg and the Chris Marker student residence in Paris.
Ahmed Belkhodja / atelier fala
Ahmed Belkhodja is a Swiss-born architect and co-founder of the Portuguese atelier fala. He studied at EPF Lausanne, CTH Gothenburg, ETH Zurich and ETH’s Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. Within his academic education, he has worked with Harry Gugger Studio in Basel, Obra Architects in New York and Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo. In 2013, right after graduation, he founded the fala studio in Porto together with Anna Luisa Soares and Filip Magalhães. The work of the fala studio, inspired by the heritage of postmodernism, is characterized by original contextuality and playful form and colors, which creates with surprising ease. Ahmed has taught at several institutions in Europe, including the IUAV in Venice and the Royal College of Art in London.
