« A home is not a house » — and a home is not a product sold by the square metre. Their journey has taken them through the French region of Auvergne and the Spanish one of Catalonia (in Olot precisely, for the connaisseurs), but it is on Lyon's famous slopes that Pauline Bourgade and Salvador Figueras have set up Fab Architectes. Ten years on, they are delivering their first projects: the refurbishment of ‘The Rio’ cinema in Clermont-Ferrand, the thermal renovation of 400 homes in Saint-Priest near Lyon (69), the regeneration of the town centre of Saint-Georges-Haute-Ville (42), and the construction of housing on a narrow industrial plot in Barcelona. These early projects are guided by an understanding of the natural and technical mechanisms that shape our relationship with the world in terms of physical comfort — hot and cold, smooth and rough, dry and damp — thereby placing the question of climate before that of architecture.
