Autor: BVAU

BVAU is an architectural and urban-planning agency formed in 2006 around two partners: Eric Bartolo and Jérôme Villemard. The agency develops ideas on various scales for understanding the constructed environment, ranging from architecture to the town, from localities to landscapes, convinced it is important to weave their challenges together. Our agency designs and builds a wide variety of themes through programs like habitat, the service industries, health, public facilities and urban planning.

Like towns and cities, architecture tackles the question of the relations between places and people. One of the agency’s major thrusts is to discern the possibilities inherent in reality so as to build a strategy of evolving action. Whatever the nature of the projects and the dimensions of the land involved, we want to make space livable  and build an environment able to strike a balance between individuals and society. With this in mind we carry out grassroots research on shapes and their construction. The agency’s approach is both prospective and thorough, strategic and sensitive.

Our projects are intended to stimulate thinking on the possibilities of living in places today based on the notion of making daily existence exceptional. After 8 developmental years the agency has by now designed the day hospital for the Montargis hospital complex, LNCSA’s head offices and 34 housing units in Boulogne-Billancourt, the head offices of Melun’s Caisses des Français à l’Étranger, 98 public housing units and a daynursery
in the urban development zone of Clichy-Batignolles in Paris’ 17th arrondissement.

Studies for housing and the service industries are currently being developed, such as the 34 public housing units in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, 40 houses in Menucourt, Plessis-Pâté’s eco-friendly Cité de l’Habitat, the conversion of offices into housing in Suresnes and a 33,000 sq.-meter industrial complex and shopping center for Point P/Saint Gobain in the town of Massy.

The agency has honed its expertise in urban studies and projects based on the experience it has accrued in Liévin, Paris’ urban-planning department, Pantin’s Établissement Public Foncier for the Île-de-France, Massy (the Franciade-Opéra district) and through impact and feasibility studies for the city of Boulogne-Billancourt.

2012 saw the agency awarded the international prize of the Europe 40 Under 40 competition. Organized by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and the Chicago Athenaeum (Museum of Architecture and Design), the purpose of the prize is to salute and encourage Europe’s most promising architects under 40.

Éric Bartolo was born in 1971 and is a government-certified architect (DPLG), graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Normandie and has gained wide-rangin experience by working abroad.

Born in 1973, Jérôme Villemard is also a DPLG architect and a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de la Ville and des Territoires (ENSAVT). He has taught since 2004 at ENSAVT in Marne-la-Vallée and since 2014 at Strasbourg’s École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture.