Lacaton & Vassal is an architecture agency founded by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal in 1987. Their projects include private and social housing, cultural and academic institutions and public spaces. They are particularly well known for their transformations of existing social housing structures and for their economical use of materials and construction techniques. The two partners won the Pritzker Prize in 2021. Early careers of the partners Lacaton and Vassal met while they were architecture students. Their first joint project out of architecture school was in Niamey, Niger, where they built a straw hut out of locally sourced bush branches. The building proved to be highly impermanent; it was dismembered by the wind within 2 years of its construction. More detailed biographies of the two partners follow: Anne Lacaton was born on August 2, 1955, in Saint-Pardoux-la-Rivière in the Dordogne region of France. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage de Bordeaux in 1980 and obtained a master's degree in urban planning at the University of Bordeaux III in 1984. From 1982 to 1988, she worked as a researcher and architect for the laboratory and the educational workshop of Arc en rêve center for architecture in Bordeaux. Jean-Philippe Vassal was born on February 22, 1954, in Casablanca, Morocco. After graduating from the École nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage de Bordeaux in 1980, he relocated to Niger, West Africa, where he worked as an architect-urban planner from 1980 to 1985. Recalling his experiences in Niger, Vassal said: Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the people are so incredible, so generous, doing nearly everything with nothing, finding resources all the time, but with optimism, full of poetry and inventiveness. It was really a second school of architecture.The two partners founded Lacaton & Vassal in Bordeaux in 1987. Approaches to architecture According to the Pritzker prize biography, Lacaton often visited Vassal while he was working in Niger and it was there that they first formulated the philosophy of architecture that was to guide them throughout their careers: "...never demolish what could be redeemed and instead, make sustainable what already exists, thereby extending through addition, respecting the luxury of simplicity and proposing new possibilities." Their aim in prioritising renovation over demolition is to give a "second life" to existing buildings, especially in the area of social housing. Lacaton states: "We never see the existing