"With professional careers of more than twenty years behind them, French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal continue to pursue their own coherent, personal approach to architecture. Theirs is a position far removed from formal originality, focusing instead on an ethical conception that upholds the idea of an architect's social responsibility: they have constructed an allusively simple discourse that embraces the complexity of contemporary reality. The few carefully chosen issues that interest them are tantamount to a wish to go beyond paradigms established by the market. This issue of 2G presents a number of their most famous projects, including the Bois-le-Pretre tower block in Paris, a built example of their investigation into how to act on obsolete blocks of flats from the 1960s and 70s in France; two multi-family housing projects in Saint-Nazaire; and the School of Architecture in Nantes. It also presents projects on a city scale, such as an urban plan for Dublin, their proposal for the Porte de la Chapelle, and the La Vecquerie eco-area in Saint-Nazaire."