Rh+ was born from a meeting of points of view on the architecture’s role, but also on the different ways to manage it to break free from the flat and conceptual prejudices into architecture.
More than belonging to a school, our architecture is an attitude. Attitude facing contexts, programs, architectures.
Alix héaume and Adrien Robain founded rh+ architecture in 2000, and the agency start with projects for private projects managers like the project “Black Box” (the extension of a single-family house) or “Nouvelle Vague” (New Wave, the restaurant and gallery of the Pin Up photo studio) before working on biggest projects like the urban study for the building of a stadium in French Guiana.
At the same time in 2004 and 2006, we organized the “Festival of the Architectures Vives” with some others young Parisian agencies in the goal to “shake the prevailing conservatism” and talk differently about architecture to the public. The same year, our agency was award by the “New 2006 Young Architects Albums Competition” At the Culture and Communication ministry initiative : this competition awards, every 2 years, few brilliant European teams under 35 years old, thanks to their projects quality, their capacity answering topical architectural and urban issues as well as their unique and specific course.
In 2006, the jury has awarded rh+ Architecture as well as 21 teams among 260 ones
Since, our first public buildings began to born : as the youth center of the city of Houilles, in the Paris’ suburbs, then a day nursery in Paris with a blue front, covered with vegetal prints.
Then we worked on various projects : from the restructuring of a mansion to transform it in a fine art workshop, to the extension of the office of the RATP (the company of Publics Transport in Paris) until the transformation of an old garage with several levels to a company headquarters, as well as the black house in Clamart (Parisian suburbs).
_ “Full Sun”, 28 housing and a day nursery, with a clever system to catch the heat from the front of the building in Paris.
_”Praise to the Shadow”, the university library of Cayenne in French Guiana, a building adapted to the hard climate with a “wood skin” making a tropical peristyle.
Today we study different projects :
_”the childhood Houses” composed by a day nursery, a child minded facility and a Child and Mother Care Center on the old bed of the Bièvre river in Paris;
_a day nursery on the former plot of Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt;
_the hyper-secured “IEDOM” : the Insitute for Currency Issue in French overseas departments un French Guiana;
_”Slow slope” : 35 family house settled on a triangular plot in Angouleme (near Bordeaux);
_”Parisian trilogy” : 54 collective housing and shops in Paris, framing the much-talked-about Henri IV House, wich will be restructured.
A formal simplicity
Because we believe architecture has to be a poetic statement rather than an reflection of the ego.
Unicity
Because we believe a project needs to claim a strong idea by hiding multiple restrictions imposed to all architectural projects.
Material experimentation
Because we believe architecture should reinvest our senses and explore the architectural materials.
Environmental Architecture
Because we believe architecture has to care about visible matters(construction, city, urban network) as much as invisible ones(energy, social links, sustainability)
Alternative architectures
Because we believe the architect must be an engaged interventionist and a new territories explorer.