When the French architect Jean-Philippe Vassal was practicing  urban planning in Niger, West Africa, in the mid-1980’s, he observed people with very few resources assembling and inventing architecture with the everyday objects and the materials at their disposal. His partner Anne Lacaton, whom he had met at architecture school in Bordeaux, saw the same when she would visit him. “We understood that everything was important. There was no reason to waste anything,” said Vassal.

An ethos of looking to cities’ existing building stock and readily accessible materials as a place to begin their designs, from social housing, cultural and academic institutions, and urban schemes, is one of the reasons the Paris-based architects have been selected as the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates, the profession’s highest honor.