(In)activity and architecture: ‘doing nothing apart from … ’

In 1996, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal were asked to redevelop a public square in Bordeaux. In a gesture picked up by architectural theory, they refused to design a new square and suggested ‘doing nothing apart from some simple and rapid maintenance works’. The architects refused activity, refused to do, and, to recall Bartleby's famous formula, decided ‘they would prefer not to’. This gesture is still relevant, if not more so, today, amid the need to question architecture's relation to construction to face the ecological ‘crisis’. At the same time, Lacaton & Vassal's inactivity is not a retreat from practice, but rather a different way of doing — a form of unmaking that, instead of exhausting potentials in a specific act, remains in relation to its own potential-not-to. This resistance to the act is particularly important today because it foregrounds an ethics of architecture in the Anthropocene. Yet, given its positive potential, one wonders why Lacaton & Vassal's inactivity has not become a key reference for architectural practice. In this article we claim this is because this project reveals architecture's compulsion to do and build, and does so by considering this constitutive limit by way of the constraints and potential of Lacaton & Vassal's unsung project.