Archinect - News

New-Territories projects forward in its "retrospective" at the FRAC Centre in Val de Loire, France

2016-11-30T20:00:00-05:00

"Architects corrupt discourse, manipulate competition, make morality their banner and social responsibilities into an amulet or agit-prop," writes New-Territories, the constantly-mutating Bangkok-based, French-born architecture studio, previously known as R&Sie and elsewhere as M4 (MindMachineMakingMyths). “They live and breathe the profound hypocrisy of human nature, with which they are consubstantial. Space is their playground, their control and coercion lever."

Deferring the authorial power assumed by architects stands as a central concern for New-Territories, which is integrally associated with the architect François Roche (despite his best efforts). Founded in 1993, New-Territories is officially “headed” by the “Avatar”, a digitally-generated androgynous figure, who tethers together a practice that is more fragmented than unitary. The “Avatar” also stands-in for a diverse roster of collaborators, including the artists Pierre Huyghe and Camille Lacadee. It is therefore a strange ...

Next Up Mini-Session #9: François Roche & Camille Lacadée of New-Territories / M4

2015-11-17T20:47:00-05:00

In celebration of Archinect Sessions' second season, we're posting the "Next Up" live-interviews we did at the Chicago Architecture Biennial as Mini-Sessions, continuing from the interviews done at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles. You can listen to past Mini-Sessions here.

Our third Mini-Session recorded during the Biennial's opening weekend features François Roche and Camille Lacadée who work together as New-Territories / M4, sometimes known as R&Sie. Check out their contribution to the Biennial here.

Listen to Nicholas Korody's "Next Up" interview with New-Territories / M4:

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Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: the Myth-Making of New-Territories / M4

2015-10-19T21:11:00-04:00

Despite its economy of presentation – just text and video, nothing flashy or interactive – the installation #mythomaniaS at the Chicago Architecture Biennial offers a density of thought at once alluring and abstruse. In this, it well conveys the concerns and formal strategies of its slippery authors, the Bangkok-based French-born collective currently known as New-Territories, but also M4 (MindMachineMakingMyths), formerly R&Sie (a near homophone of heresy in French), and occasionally François Roche and Camille Lacadée.

A set of monitors plays several of their mesmerizing and visually-lush videos that were made in collaboration with some of the most influential artists of the day, including Pierre Huyghe and Carsten Holler. Filmed across the world, from Bangkok and its environs to the snow-covered Swiss Alps, they should be read as “architectural scenarios,” something like provocations or insinuations of possible ways of relating to a context. “Environments and paranoia as symptoms o...

MMYST: a crowd-funded, human-animal hybrid building by François Roche and Camille Lacadee of New-Territories/M4

2015-09-30T16:14:00-04:00

"What we propose here is a different format for making architecture," Camille Lacadee states in a deadpan tone, "with multiple clients, multiple users, backers, lovers, following a bottom-up mode of exchanges and desire." A robotic arm extends into the frame and offers her a bowl of bird's nest soup, which she takes. "Oh it's hot!"

Alongside François Roche, Lacadee heads the ever-mutating, radically-experimental architecture studio currently-known-as New-Territories / M4. For their new project MMYST, or "mke_Me_yungR_sheltR_tmptation," they've launched a Kickstarter campaign that includes what is likely one of the most wonderfully strange videos that's ever been on the crowd-funding website.

According to the campaign description, MMYST would comprise a 140 sqm (1500 ft²) "experimental hybrid building" to be shared by humans and swiftlets, a species of bird that makes unique nests out of saliva that are prized for their culinary applications.

Sited on an outcropping of cooled-lava in th...

François Roche considers Rem's Venice Biennale "Obscene"

2014-06-10T18:10:00-04:00

Obscene was the Venice Biennale of Rem Koolhass On one side the fetishism of the industrial products and components (Italian International Pavilion) and on the other the celebration of the political failure of the world… as a naive agitprop able to wrap the architect with politically correct conscientiousness… self-complaisance for this comfortable dualism.

We are in the pursuit of the diagrammatic hoax he himself promoted 20 years ago, same arrogance of reductionism to avoid embracing and gathering complexity in a productive way, in an aesthetic way, for a critical production, not for a simulation of a critical behavior… sponsored by Rolex.

The New Architect

2012-04-11T13:18:00-04:00

This past Monday the anti-establishment infiltrated Yale School of Architecture in a dashing gold scarf. Seducing the audience with a breathless stream of “Frenglish,” whose charm derived from the speaker’s sheer enthusiasm for his subject, François Roche rose to a god-like status typically only afforded movie stars. And if there were a god in whose likeness he is modeled, it would have to be Janus, the forward-backward-looking deity of beginnings and transitions.

Related: R&Sie(n) (cancellation letter)

R&Sie(n) (cancellation letter)

2011-03-24T19:49:00-04:00

Dear Sci-Arc Staff I have no other way than to cancel the Sci-Arc exhibition in the Gallery (scheduled in May 25) and the lecture (scheduled the April 6) The gap of point of view, and the lack of interest for politics and attitudes, reducing the architecture process to a unique design agenda cannot fit with our scenario of production and scenario of speeches.