Point Supreme, Athens versus Mars, Paris

Point Supreme, Athens

Marianna Rentzou and Konstantinos Pantazis, both born in Greece, have lived in Athens, London, Brussels, Tokyo and Rotterdam, and worked for agencies such as OMA and MVRDV, before founding Point Supreme in Rotterdam in 2008. Their name "Point Supreme" emerges from Breton's words: "Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived contradictorily. It would be futile to look for any other motive for Surrealist activity than the hope of determining this point...".

They regularly publish self-initiated projects for the city of Athens on a variety of scales ranging from domestic and intimate interiors. Their projects for this city were exhibited in the Greek Pavilion at the13th Venice Architecture Biennale. Athens Projects, the first book dedicated to their work, was published by the Graham Foundation in Chicago in 2015.

Point Supreme was awarded by Europan Norway in 2011 for social housing in Trondheim (with Alexandros Genousis and Beth Hughes), the Faliro Pier in Athens, a sheltered public space in Tel Aviv, a fire station in Leopoldsburg in Belgium (with Bel-architecten), the Mediterranean Institute of the City and Territories in Marseille (built, with NP2F, Marion Bernard and Odile Seyler & Jacques Lucan, architects, Atelier Roberta landscaping) and an artist-run centre in Genk (construction of which will soon begin). They teach at Columbia University in New York and EPFL in Lausanne.
 

Mars Architects, Paris

Julien Broussart, Raphaël Renard and Sylvain Rety met at the Paris-la Seine School of Architecture, now known as Paris-Val de Seine. Raphaël Renard then spent eight years at the Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Julien Broussart joined him after two years spent at Sanaa in Tokyo at the Rolex Learning Center and at the Louvre-Lens. Sylvain Rety began his career at Michel Rémon, then Arène & Edeikins, before Atelier 2/3/4/ where he stayed from 2004 to 2011. Theyfounded Mars Architectes in 2012 in Paris. They will then go on to win the 2014 Ajap Prize.

A Haussmann-style building that seeks to free itself from alignment, a gymnasium with baroque geometry, an inhabited piece of furniture placed on a car park slab, a refurbishment that isolates and reactivates the building's original principles... Their aim is to reveal architecture through the poetry of place, the architect being a creative revealer: “From these mental, vague and intuitive images, a conceptual, functional, constructive and poetic narrative is born. The story settles in, is shared and the architecture takes shape.”

They have delivered a small, all-wood building of 14 flats in an enclosed courtyard in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. They will also be working on the Anne Franck secondary school in Anthony designed by Jean Nouvel (1980). By eliminating the false ceilings, revealing the patios that had been partitioned off, and removing the mezzanines, they are rediscovering the original architecture and reinterpreting it while improving thermal comfort.