Tectoniques architectes   Lyon

The Tectoniques firm is led by four partner architects : Pierre-Yves Lebouc, Max Rolland, Alain Vargas and Raphaël Verboud. It practices an « unplugged » architecture — simple, sometimes rough, often built in wood, a little on the margins of the large « official » productions.

The firm’s works are mostly built with timber frame construction, with a high degree of prefabrication and limited on-site work. The ideal construction, in our view, should resemble a dry-assembly operation — like a giant construction set, fast, clean and precise. The coherence of a project is assessed through a systemic reading.

Each new project is not radically reinvented. It follows in the wake of its predecessors. We reuse constructive and architectural stances, and we recycle elementary particles, even at the risk of a certain repetition. We maintain that, within a tight economic context, repetition is a less degrading response than laboriously constructed invention. This sobriety, or this realism, is not a renunciation.

(Original text of 2009, machine translated in 2026.)