In Lacaton & Vassal’s early works, such as the Maison Latapie and more explicitly the Cap Ferret House, the decision to let trees pierce floors and roofs is not a whimsical gesture but a radical act of architectural realism rooted in respect, restraint and material pragmatism; the trees, left untouched, are not symbolic ornaments but living elements that reconfigure the domestic space, challenging the legacy of modernist erasure and introducing a quiet form of spatial socialism, where the built environment negotiates with what already exists instead of replacing it, using affordable industrial materials like corrugated steel and polycarbonate to create open, adaptable structures that neither dominate nor romanticize nature, but accept its presence as condition and companion; the house does not conquer the forest but makes room for it, cutting precise holes in slab and ceiling to let trunks continue their path, turning what might be seen as obstacles into structural co-inhabitants, and this operation, executed without spectacle, reveals a kind of design rigor often absent from both technocratic and sentimental approaches to sustainability—here the ethical stance is embedded in construction logic, not slogans, and the result is a domestic space that embodies a political attitude of minimal interference and maximum utility, both modest and generous, where architecture acts more like a host than a master, and where the realism of materials meets the realism of site constraints to form a new language of non-destructive modernity.
