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 ...

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...