"Each time, TCAU experiments with how to link city and architecture, city and housing, living spaces and public spaces... It has an attraction for urban contexts with asserted singularities, social as well as geographical, and proposes contemporary responses that highlight the urban issue". Sylvie Groueff, journalist in "Exhibition TCAU" Arc en Rêve Centre d'Architecture - Bordeaux.
TCAU (Tania Concko Architects Urbanists) was founded in 1997 by Tania Concko in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its Franco-Dutch anchoring put the agency in a unique position to provide innovative and creative solutions to urban or architectural project strategies and working methods between project actors, through a broadened vision enriched by this dual experience.
The agency is based on an approach that focuses on a fine and "critical" apprehension of contemporary urban reality in all its scales, with the objective of constantly seeking to weave and multiply the links between architecture, the city and the territory. TCAU develops its projects within the framework of a multidisciplinary and collaborative design process that involves research, rigor and creativity.
This transversal and multidisciplinary attitude questions the city, the districts and the buildings, in a specific reading at the crossroads of the different contexts, and allows the agency to consolidate a committed and singular vision of urban and architectural projects, linking landscape, urban, social, ecological and programmatic issues.
TCAU's initiating project (Prix de la 1ere Œuvre du Moniteur 2000), the urban reconversion of ZAANWERF, an industrial site on the waterfront in Zaanstad in the Netherlands, has been widely published, exhibited and awarded several international prizes (Nominated for the Mies Van der Rohe Awards 2001, Arie Kepler Prijs 2001, Prix Delarue de l'Académie d'Architecture 2000, Bauweld Preis 2000).
The quality of the agency's work and its unwavering commitment to the issues of housing and living will be rewarded with the 2017 Housing Prize awarded by the Academy of Architecture.
The multi-use tower B1A4 on Bruneseau Paris 13 delivered at the end of 2020, the innovative typologies of B3 and B1 on Terres Neuves (Prix de l'oeuvre Originale des Femmes Architectes 2017), the Quartier des Terres Neuves in Begles, the housing of Lot B in Bois-Habite on Euralille 2 (Nominated for the Pyramides d'Argent 2012), the PA1sud block on Lyon Confluence (Pyramides d'Or 2010), the Plan Guide of the Bordeaux Campus, represent some of the significant operations of the agency, produced over the last ten years.
In addition to the 2008 and 2010 Venice Biennials, its work has been exhibited at the Arc-en-Rêve in Bordeaux and on several occasions at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, contributing to international debates on the production of the contemporary city.
TCAU has built up a solid reputation, particularly in the development of complex sites, through its achievements and projects, anchored in metropolitan sites, and through its active participation in research on its predilection subjects: urban density, evolution of lifestyles, climate change, well-being and quality of living, social mix and inclusion.
TEAM
Beyond the personalities and singularities of TCAU's collaborators, there is a real desire to apply, internally as well as with all the external contributors associated with the projects, the bases of good understanding and Dutch "working together"...
With a wealth of experience based on the plurality and positive confrontation of the cultural diversities of the team, the projects, whatever their size, from conception to completion, are always built with the same attentive involvement, the same transversal and critical look.
Interface, interaction, interstice... quickly become the key words of a curious and open attitude at the heart of the agency's reflections, from the apprehension of projects to their development.
The city, the landscape, architecture... the project team, rather than splitting these essential entities, endeavours to bring them together and reconcile them in a single forward-looking impulse. Attentive to the new needs and uses of the 21st century, it knows how to propose to today's inhabitants ways of living - from the distribution of a dwelling to public spaces and urban routes - that favour new forms of appropriation that go beyond physical and social barriers and open up new perspectives.
Without worrying about fashions, without succumbing to gratuitousness, TCAU weaves the taut thread of a research that, in its rigour, welcomes contrast and mixity.
