This week, we travel to Neuchâtel, Zurich and Lausanne to meet Anna MacIver-ek and Axel Chevroulet, the duo behind MacIver-ek Chevroulet. Their practice seeks “precision as a tool to achieve an architecture sensitive to its context and generous to its users” - yet for them, precision is inseparable from freedom.
Where lies the balance between control and release? “Sometimes you go to the toilet and when you come back, things have been decided.” Architecture, after all, is a shared process - unpredictable, collective, and alive.
“We started to learn to love this idea of constraints.” Limits, they say, are fertile ground - shaping creativity rather than restricting it. That is how breaking down, reassembling, and connecting become part of their design language, almost “like a motor, you can tear the buildings apart and reuse certain elements.”
They are fascinated by connections, both literal and conceptual. “The connections used to be in the center of architecture but disappeared with the use of concrete that is able to hide all the connections.” What was once visible became hidden, and they seek to bring that clarity back: “Screwing, nailing, or simply placing one thing on top of another. (…) Making knots is insanely efficient. (…) We’re hoping to use magnets soon.”
“You need to have freedom in every scale of representation… everything works in a sketch and nothing works in a sketch.” Between drawings, models, and images, they navigate multiple kinds of precision. “No medium is less precise than another; it is just another type of precision.”
“It’s part of the job to be lost,” they say.
But fear not, “if you have the right process, somehow, you will find a way through.”
Guests: Anna MacIver-ek + Axel Chevroulet (Neuchâtel + Zurich + Lausanne, Switzerland)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)
Brasil