Experience
Experience is a Paris-based architecture office founded in 2020 by Tristan Chadney (Cambridge, 1988), Laurent Esmilaire (Toulon, 1986), and Éric Lapierre (Tarbes, 1966), evolving from the previous ELEX office founded by Éric Lapierre in 2000. Experience defends the idea of architecture as a critical activity with inhabited space as its object. Its architecture, by definition exploratory in its content and procedures, leads to concrete built experiences.
Experience seeks to unravel the secrets of form and its theoretical, cultural, social, and political implications, in order to design an emancipating architecture for everyone. Experience promotes an architecture of abundance with the strictest economy of means: an architecture that is light and existential, joyful and serious at the same time.
Experience’s practice is a continuation of its teaching at EPFL Lausanne, ENSA Paris-Est (Marne-la-Vallée), Harvard GSD (Cambridge, MA), DAMS (Bologna), Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, UQAM and UdM (Montreal).
Experience was chief curator of the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennial (Poetics of Reason) and regularly publishes articles and books on architectural theory as an inseparable part of its practice. The office’s projects are regularly awarded and exhibited.
Experience also produces experimental musical performances that take place in the buildings conceived by the office, acting as analogies of its spatial practice. Records of these events are released.
