French architects Jean Philippe Vassal (left) and Anne Lacaton speak during a session at the Herald Design Forum 2024 held in Seoul on Tuesday. (Lee Sang-sub/The Korea Herald)

Humanity lies in the architecture touched by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal. They pay tribute to what is already existing, whether it is nature, humans or other buildings.

“It is about transformation from the existing, and with the existing,” Vassal said at the Herald Design Forum 2024 held on Tuesday in Seoul with the theme of “Inspiration, Limitless?”

The duo's renovation of a 16-story, 96-unit social housing tower block, “Tour Bois le Pretre,” in Paris, originally designed in 1962, is just such a project.

Allowing the inhabitants to continue living inside the building during the project without evicting them while the renovation was done, the architects came up with ways to transform the building through increasing the floorplates to enlarge the rooms, adding winter gardens, terraces and floor-to-ceiling glass.

“The building should also be seen from inside and not always from outside. We should look at the buildings from inside with what the inhabitants have done during 20, 30 years,” Vassal said. “It was the way we intended to make the project.”

Architects Jean Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton speak during a session at the Herald Design Forum 2024 held in Seoul on Tuesday. (Lee Sang-sub/The Korea Herald)

The house in the forest in Lege-Cap-Ferret in southwestern France is one of the architects' early projects, completed in 1998 among the pines on an undeveloped plot.

“In this case, we wanted to see if it was possible to build without destroying the trees and the sand. Architecture is made of simplicity -- meaning to be with (the) climate and not fighting against it,” Vassal said.

The FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais is an art center built in 2013 in Dunkerque, northern France, in the shell of a former boat warehouse. The architects left the former industrial building intact without filling the hall with museum spaces. Instead, they built a duplicate of it.

“We were fascinated by this big void,” said Lacaton on their impression of the former shipyard warehouse, adding that eliminating this void seemed a big loss, so they tried to see how they could keep the space for contemporary art collections. The new duplicate building has six levels for exhibition and storage.

“(The best) architecture provides a maximum of freedom for the users. It is also good with the existing (buildings, people and surroundings),” Lacaton said.

Lacaton and Vassal won the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in the architecture field, in 2021.