The online directory search.ch lists Marcel Lachat at 118 route des Tournettes in Troinex, on the edge of the canton of Geneva and a stone’s throw from the French border. According to the directory, Lachat runs a “shop for creative pursuits”, which local.ch describes as a “DIY store in Troinex”. That sets the scene for the territory over which this rebellious handyman reigns supreme, as he welcomes us in his flip-flops and shorts in the middle of a sweltering August.

Born in 1947 and a native of the Jura, Lachat forged his character of resistance growing up in a family that campaigned for the canton’s independence. He himself was a member of the Bélier group.1 He calls himself an “anarchitect”, a builder, an innovator and an essayist. When I asked him about disobedience in architecture, he immediately replied: “That’s exactly what I am. All my life I’ve been driven to disobey. I’ll tell you why: I’m the son of a customs officer. Customs officers are part of the military department, so they have to... they don’t have the right to strike, they don’t have the right to demonstrate... they have to obey. My mother... my father and mother were from Jura, they were separatists, my father couldn’t speak out because he was a civil servant. My mother, on the other hand, had the right. And she always said: ‘I’m married to a man, but I’m not married to the army’. She instilled in us, if you like, this way of challenging, of not blindly obeying, the rules. That’s something I inherited from my mother and also from my grandfather, who lived through the war and knew very well that laws are there to be bent. In fact, all the lawyers in the world work on this principle; they all find a loophole to justify any wrongdoing, whether it’s murder, theft or whatever else”. And the anarchist in him (“a soft one”, he points out) gets carried away...

There’s no doubt that disobedience runs through the life of this creative character, always ready to explore the limits of what’s possible. Undaunted by risk-taking, he defied the rules by developing a method of bungeeB jumping from a crane. Consistently disobedient, in the early 1970s he introduced hang-gliding to Geneva, where it was totally forbidden at the time, first by jumping off a hill in Vésenaz and then, before long, by launching himself from the top of the Salève. He eventually turned it into a real profession, exploring the range of non-motorised flying machines, developing and teaching hang-gliding, then paragliding and flying microlights.

Les Tournettes: in the Land of Lewis Carrol

Since the 1980s, buildings of all kinds have sprung up at the park Les Tourettes, a.k.a “Parc Lachat”, a site that was once used as a landing strip for hang gliders, paragliders and other microlights, and for which Lachat was the inventor and unrivalled conductor at the foot of the Salève. More recently, he has been involved in hosting, converting or building mobile homes and various architectural structures. The first installations were his own house, then the clubhouse of the hang-gliding and paragliding centre, where enthusiasts could meet up after practice. Lachat tells us: “When I stopped using my landing strip, well, I said to myself, I’m going to have fun building”. There is every reason to believe that the notion of entertainment is central to Lachat’s activities on his land: “diversion” understood in its etymological sense of “di-vertere” both as diversion and then as amusement. Indeed, Les Tourettes is the very place where objects that are often reused and diverted from their original purpose blossom for a second life. As Lachat explains: “They don’t ask for a mandate to build a house, so the mandate is mine, and as I don’t need to do anything because I already have a home, as soon as I’m given something I try to use it and that forces me to do something. Where you saw me earlier, it’s because I was given some steel decking panels and I had the idea of making a bridge over there.”2 

At the far end of the entrance courtyard to this astonishing world, an enormous clock, reminiscent of the rabbit’s pocket watch from Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland, flanks the facade of Lachat’s home, which is made from a conglomeration of containers. A large sign indicates his company name LACHAT construction Sarl. Généraliste en bâtiment. The first floor of the building is reached either by an open steel staircase or by a hydraulic platform used as a goods or passenger lift. We were welcomed into the vast dining room with its fully equipped kitchen, which is not very different from that of a conventional home.

However, the visit begins with a tour of grounds, where various structures have been installed, “habitable sculptures” as Lachat likes to say, often salvaged, a way of “rescuing the heritage” or reinventing it. You could have woken up in the home of Lewis Carroll, or wandered through a museum of vernacular architecture, or got lost on the paths of Christiania in Copenhagen. When we visited the site, it was the day after a storm and branches littered the ground, but the buildings, precarious as they may seem, had held firm. The “pirate bubble”, for which Lachat is famous, stands in a prominent position, raised up on a steel column.

Lachat explains how a piece of festive décor from the 225th anniversary celebrations of the invention of Carouge on the Place de Sardaigne was reused, given a new colour and integrated into a new building. He shows me a yurt available as extra accommodation, a reimagined Scandinavian hut, Jacques Kaufmann’s “Mud Fired House”, a terracotta dome salvaged from an exhibition held at the Ariana Museum in 2019 and customised with a metal frame accessible by a few steps to form a belvedere, a triangulated structure à la Buckminster Fuller, a tree house, and so on. Lachat takes me as far as the jardin set up partly in a kind of greenhouse housing tomato plants and aromatic herbs, partly in the open air, and which a resident of the “colonie Lachat” cultivates and makes flourish. At the moment he himself is busy building a tiny house at the far end of the park, the plans for which are in his head. “For this kind of structure,” he says, “you don’t really need plans.”

I had come to Les Tournettes to question the author of the famous pirate bubble which hit the headlines in 1970. Still today, Lachat keeps binders of press cuttings from the period, collected at the time by his wife. And I discover that the bubble was truly the tip of the iceberg: there’s a whole universe I wasn’t expecting that accompanies the said bubble, which bravely stands in the field, half-century after it was made, perched on a metal structure to evoke its original suspended situation, as when it was installed against the facade of a building in Geneve. There is also a replica made more recently by Lachat, in response to the ever-pressing demand from museum people and exhibition organisers. However, in aid of such fetishism, the one on show is always labelled as the original bubble, a little dirty and aged, some would say patinated, while his copy remains tucked away at Les Tournettes.

The Bubble, from Theory to Practice

It was aged 23 that Lachat, fresh out of Tech (aka Technicum) on rue de la Prairie in Geneva and “without a complex”, made a name for himself by installing a protrusion, nicknamed the pirate bubble, on the facade of the prominent modern building of Grand-Saconnex, located on rue François Lehmann, to enlarge the small flat in which he had been cramped since the birth of his daughter. The housing crisis was at its worst in Geneva at the time, and no matter how hard Lachat looked for a larger place to live, there was none to be found: “For my daughter, who was born in 1970, I started running to the Régies to get a bigger flat, and every time I went to ask they had nothing to offer me, so one day I decided to solve my problem myself. At the time, there were Swiss people like me who used to go and demonstrate on the Plaine de Plainpalais to say: ‘I’m a Swiss soldier and I can’t find a place to live’ and then they’d go and demonstrate with their military kit and then I, instead of demonstrating in this way, wanted to propose something and so I proposed a habitable cell that you could add to your house. This followed on from an idea for an architecture competition we had entered with Pascal Häusermann (1936-2011), in which we were proposing structures in which cells could be hung. So that was theoretical, and I said to myself, we’re going to do it. I was twenty-three at the time, and I had no ethical problems, because people who have been to architecture school and who are building don’t dare do that, whereas a young person aged twenty-three, you don’t have any hang-ups and you just go for it.”

Having heard of Pascal Häusermann’s research into cellular housing in polyester and shotcrete, Lachat went to meet him and began a collaboration that would last around a decade. By this time, Häusermann had already built his father’s house in Grilly (1959), the house in Pougny (1960) and the Eau-Vive motel near Raon (1966-1967). He and his wife, Claude Costy, were then busy building their own house in Minzier, La Ruine (1968-1969), bubbles of concrete sails above the ruins of a presbytery, now a listed monument.

The idea of producing an exterior extension in the form of a fibreglass-reinforced polyester bubble insulated internally with sprayed polyurethane followed a competition in which Lachat took part with Häusermann. But above all to the Manifesto of Insurrectionary Architecture by the Grenoble-born Chanéac, read out in public for the first time on 4 May 1968 at the Royal Academy of Architecture in Brussels. In it, he describes a process whereby users appropriate their housing by adding suction cup elements to the buildings they live in: “When I contemplate a large housing estate, I want to give its inhabitants the means to realise their dreams and needs of the moment by making available to them or giving them the technical means to clandestinely create parasite cells. They could enlarge their flats using suction cup cells fixed to the facades. Children could recreate the poetic world of the attics of bygone times by installing cells on the terraces of buildings. Guest rooms would appear on lawns. We would witness an explosion of insurrectionary architecture.”3 The pirate bubble would thus be an opportunity to put into practice what is still only a utopia, that of a habitable cell attached to a structure.

The young Lachat, driven by great curiosity, was ready to experiment: “I wanted to do things with all the technology that was appearing; it was the seventies. It was after May ‘68 ... there was an explosion, everything that existed was called into question. May 68!” In the effervescent innovation of the Trente Glorieuses,4 during which Lachat is proud to have lived, the field was open for such feats of construction, totally outlawed by the straitjacket of today’s standards and regulations, as he explains: “All we wanted to do was make a lot of polyester, plastic, polyurethane, materials that today are virtually banned. [...] the pirate bubble, it is made from fibreglass-reinforced polyester like you build a boat or a canoe from; it’s the same thing. And insulation, so I also had the privilege of knowing a chemist who worked for NASA on heat shields for satellites re-entering the atmosphere and that’s how I got the opportunity to be able to spray polyurethane. It was all the latest stuff.”

In the workshop of a mechanic friend, Lachat made his bubble from the matrix of a weather balloon inflated with a vacuum cleaner that worked in reverse. A hairdresser in Payerne had exclusive rights to these balloons, which sold for 40 francs a piece. The fibreglass fabric, then coated with resin using a brush, was applied directly to the balloon. All you had to do was wait for it to dry, then spray the insulation inside. It was in this belly of white polyester lined with ochre polyurethane that the cradle of the newborn baby girl in need of a nursery was installed. A photograph from the period shows the two parents standing next to the cradle lined with ruffled fabric in Vichy plaid, matching the curtains that obscure the large porthole that serves as a window.

Creating a Buzz

Lachat’s account of the installation of the pirate bubble towed by hand on a wooden cart in the middle of the street on the evening of the Escalade5 is quite defiant. We discover that this man knew how to create a buzz: “I knew that evening the police were all in town, because there were people who took advantage of being masked to go and rob jewellery shops etc. So I knew the police weren’t there. I knew I was doing something illegal, that I’d be fined. And I said to myself: this is going to be a big story; that’s what I thought. I contacted all the media, the radio, the TV... and then I told them I had a scoop. And I’ll give you the scoop if you pay me what I'll be fined. But I hadn’t told them what the scoop was, so they didn’t know whether it was going to be an exorbitant fine or not. No one stuck their neck out. In the end, I told everyone on the radio, on TV, in the Tribune, in Switzerland still at the time, and in fact I had summoned them for 5 o’clock I think it was on 11 December 1970 at 5 o’clock, I think, and they all came, the radio, the TV, the newspapers and they even helped me in the sense that it was already dark at that time, in winter, the friend who was supposed to bring me the rope was Pascal himself and he was always late. And we pulled... I’d been to see my upstairs neighbour on the third floor; I told her I had a piece of furniture that didn’t fit through the stairwell, so it would be nice if we could pull it up from your place. She gave me her keys. She was a girl who worked at the United Nations, an old dame (laughs) well, a spinster, sorry! I installed a pulley and so on, and that was a bit of a mishap too... What I’d installed got all bent out of shape, because I hadn’t thought about the fact that to lift 200 kilos, you also have to pull with 200 kilos, so in the end you end up with 400 kilos of traction and the bracket I’d made got completely twisted and fortunately I had a good carpenter friend who said we’d carry on... anyway, we set it up with the help of the TV journalists who lit up the outside of the building with their spotlights. They filmed at the same time... At 6 o’clock in the evening it was just hung up with wood clamps and at 7 o’clock we were watching ourselves on television and we could see what we had done an hour before.”

Lachat took advantage of the festive period to implement his pirate bubble, knowing that no measures would be taken during the ensuing holidays. It was at the start of the new school year that State Councillor Ruffieux called him to lecture him and tell him that they were going to find him accommodation in Le Lignon. He moved out three weeks later, taking with him his bubble, in which the entire Conseil d’EtatA (Council of State) had met for a drink beforehand, and set it up on land where his father had kept beehives.

Disobedience: the Architecture of Free Choice

Here and there, in the immediate post-war period, movements of young architects were springing up, calling for greater freedom for users and more inventiveness on the part of project managers. The ground was ripe for disobedience. In 1965, the GIAP (Groupe international d’architecture prospective) was formed under the leadership of writer and art critic Michel Ragon, and was joined by Pascal Häusermann, Claude Costy and Jean-Louis Chanéac (1931-1993), among a group of intellectuals and architects who were paving the way for a forward-looking utopia to shake up backward-looking practices and radical modernity. The banality of post-war architectural production and the squandering of land in the face of demographic growth were denounced. They deplored the “millions of cubic metres poured out according to simple (not to say simplistic) precepts”, which Chanéac would describe as “a new order spreading like a pastry chef’s syrup”. Ragon took up the cause of the protesters and praised their proposals: Chanéac’s curvilinear project for Beaubourg (1971)represented, in his eyes, the assassination of the “famous right angle, the cream pie of contemporary architecture”.B The young Lachat was immersed in this environment of resistance to the regulations and standards that levelled the playing field while exhausting it, and he took advantage of this intellectual fervour to act. In the meantime, Häusermann continued to develop his prototypes of habitable cells, right up to the prefabricated plastic Domobiles,C which he tried unsuccessfully to industrialise. The seeds of “blobitecture” would fertilise subsequent research into biomorphic architecture.

The Nagakin Capsule Tower (1970-1972) in Tokyo by Kisho Kurokawa, an emblem of the movement known as “metabolism”, and the “multi-hull urbanism” of the Lyon-born architect Daniel Grataloup, who was living in Geneva at the time, simultaneously emerged in Japan at the crossroads of this innovative architectural pursuit based on housing capsules. Unlike Grataloup’s projects, the models of which feature prominently at WOAgri, the Japanese tower, consisting of two reinforced concrete masts to which prefabricated capsules equipped with cutting-edge technology for the time were attached, actually saw the light of day in Ginza before being dismantled due to its obsolescence.

The need to break free from the rules by imagining other ways of living and developing met with opposition from the authorities in both Switzerland and France. So much so that, with the exception of the experiment conducted in the centre of Douvaine, it was mainly private residences that saw the light of day. The height of exuberance was perhaps reached in a few residences on the French Riviera built by the Hungarian Antti Lovag (1920-2014), such as Pierre Cardin’s bubble palace (1975), or by Jacques Couëlle (1902-1996), which Lachat also touched upon during our discussion.

On closer examination, it is the whole “anarchitecture” of developing countries, where control is weak, that infringe regulations without too much fear of reprisals and practise evolving architecture on a daily basis. All sorts of outgrowths spring up to meet the needs of the inhabitants as the family grows: cubbyholes in the roof, balconies turned into extra rooms, spontaneous extensions... when there aren’t whole neighbourhoods of informal architecture or shanty towns. Lachat’s pirate bubble approach to involving users, giving them the freedom to intervene in their own homes, is arguably a prototype of what contemporary architects incorporate into more recent projects such as the Quinta Monroy half-house project (2003), by Elemental, led by the Chilean Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena. In these kinds of projects, it’s up to the user to make the project their own, according to their needs.

Message to Young Architects: Revolt!

Lachat’s disobedience is tempered by a love of art and a sincere desire to be organic. The man who was a second-degree epigone of the GIAP has a more general admiration for artist-architects driven by a desire to produce an evolutionary architecture in phase with nature or inspired by its principles. In particular, he cites the Austrian Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) and the Swiss Christian Hunziker (1926-1991), who designed the residential building “Les Schtroumpfs” in Geneva: “I identify with Hundertwasser. I also knew Christian Hunziker at the time, so I identify with him too, with his evolutionary architecture and his closeness to nature. As for Hundertwasser, I say I make sculptures that can be lived in. If you just make sculptures – I love artists, but look at this sculpture here... yes, they’re dust catchers ... they’re fulfilled, they express themselves, but they’re only for the eye. But I create volumes that are interesting from the outside and to be lived in from the inside”. There’s no doubt that in his eyes, the use value of architecture justifies the artistic intentions that he lends to his own creations, in keeping with the spirit of the living pod that Chanéac built for himself on the heights of Aix-les-Bains and which is now a listed monument. For an architect, sculpting and shaping the habitat as closely as possible to its users is undoubtedly one of the true motives for continuing to disobey the prescriptive and administrative straitjacket that governs the world.

When asked what advice he would give to today’s young architects, Lachat exclaims: “Poor people, they can’t do anything. With all these standards and rules!” Then he rephrases the question: “What message should we leave young architects in the face of the plethora of regulations? Plead for the exception, the waiver every time they have an innovation!” You can tell from his tone that everything has to go. In his eyes, even Stéphane Hessel’s pamphlet Indignez-vous! (2010) doesn’t go far enough. Architects have to take action: “We have to react and not let ourselves be pushed around. “Revolt,” he concludes.