First a collective of architects founded in 2001 by Julien Choppin and Nicola Delon, Encore Heureux claims a generalist practice to build building as well as installations, playgrounds, or exhibitions… At the crossroads of types and equipped with a lucid and critical enthusiasm, they imagine the conditions and prompt situations in order to inhabit the complexity of the world. In 2016, Sébastien Eymard joins in as a third partner, followed by Sonia Vu who makes partner in 2019, and the team grows to include about twenty-five creators from various backgrounds. So that Encore Heureux keeps rhyming with high standards, lucidity, optimism, and commitment…
TO GO BEYOND SPECIALIZATIONS
We strongly believe in the necessity of thinking globally, in a way that include at once people and situations, in opposition to our world of experts and specialists. We refuse labels and all the professional barcodes that are meant to provide all the informations on a merchandise and guide, on a standardized shelve, the clients’ choice toward the artist, the decorator, the designer, the scenographer, the interior architect, the graphic designer, the web designer, the landscaper, the fashion designer or the architect. We obviously do not claim to be, ourselves, all of these. However, we are in favor of a sensitive and open methodology of work, of a collective process fed by as numerous as joyous partnerships. We do claim to be « globally generous » and consider the here described approach to be the only one able to allow us to accurately understand very specific issues.
TO CULTIVATE ONE’S DESIRE
Each question asked, each situation, each story is by definition unique and so requires a singular answer. To re-question the client’s needs and desires at each step of our work has proven to be the sine qua non condition for a successful project. The desires thus cultivated, clarified and re-affirmed, will lead our work on the right track and nourish it with goals and point of references. We imagine our creative mission as the one of a mountain guide who, through the steep tracks of reality, has to accompany these desires safely and soundly. To do so we have a continuous ambition to find new, more reliable, more beautiful and faster paths.
TO CAUSE THE UNEXPECTED
Our team has proven itself to be a fertile territory from which countless possibilities keep emerging. To these numerous visions we add various inspiration influences drawn from the contemporary art field as much as from the one of vernacular architecture. Our work process consists of round-trips from those unbridled imaginary worlds to various forms of modeling, from stimulations to simulations. On the way, we will have to pass by the miniature stage, the cardboard model, the overall view as well as the detailed one, thanks to a game of scales from which the magic occurs that brings us back to childhood, allow us to see differently and keep awakening our curiosity.
TO THINK MORE TO CONSUME LESS
As we cannot build without materials, destruction and consumption, we cannot think of a fair and economical project without spending extra time imagining it. We consider as not only possible but also necessary the invention of new mode of construction: economically and ecologically sober, thus rich in meaning and imagination. Each situation offers a multitude of resources that only a thorough analysis may uncover. Each place is bursting with objects, memories, living and sedimented matter to be used or inspired from. To us, the relevance of a project results from a know-how to compose with what is available to us here and now, an ability to tell new stories from a present that constantly need to be explored and re-explored.
TO FORESEE THE FUTURE
A project can only be assessed over time. If the materials can happily be worn out over time, the pleasure and comfort of use of a build needs to remain still if not improve and renew itself with the years. We cannot think of and build a shape, an object, a building without anticipating what its future will be so that they will remain flexible, rich of new and renewed potentialities and thus the hosts of countless and endless life experiences. The inauguration is a beginning, not an end. It marks a step in the course of a story that us, the creators, should be held partially responsible for, by definition as much as by conviction. Today more than ever, architects car not avoid their responsibility, their liability, toward the world that comes. The need, must and have to imagine what will be tomorrow, and what tomorrow will be.