Étienne Tricaud

Etienne TRICAUD, born in 1960, architect (Ecole de Paris Tolbiac) and engineer (Ecole Polytechnique, ENPC Ecole National des Ponts et Chaussées).

Etienne Tricaud, portrait

Biography

Etienne TRICAUD owes his interest in architecture to his uncle Pierre PRUNET, chief architect for the historic monuments department. While carrying out restoration works that fully respected a prestigious heritage, his agency also designed a large number of new projects. However, his greatest satisfaction was to work on projects that closely linked the two types of works. This approach allowed Etienne TRICAUD to discover a vision of contemporary architectural design expressed as turning a new page in the history of a site; developing a sensitive language to communicate the spirit of a setting already influenced by nature and man, a language able to convey a rich past while also expressing its particular era.

His visits to the PRUNET agency led to a strong interest in the art of building and an appreciation of a rigorous and restrained approach that he would subsequently refine while studying architecture under Roland SCHWEITZER. From this experience and his (dual) architectural training, Etienne TRICAUD acquired the conviction that an informed project approach could only be based on a subtle marriage between architecture and engineering, both of which providing different yet complementary sources of creation in their relationship to reality. The result is an architecture aware of the uses to be made of the building and the identity of the setting, and an engineering based on the understanding and use of the laws of physics.

During his studies, attracted by teams drawing together both architects and engineers, he discovered the ADP architecture and engineering agency, a firm run by Paul ANDREU, where he worked as an architect on several projects.

He began his professional activity as a structural engineer working for OVE ARUP (London) and RFR (Paris). Peter RICE involved him in the design of a large number of glass and steel structures (including the glazed roofs of the Louvre museum) and initiated him into his very personal approach to structures which demanded both deduction and intuition, a scientific approach and considerable sensitivity.

For several years, he taught structural design to architecture students at the Ecole Paris la Seine, attempting to imbue them with his enthusiasm while providing them with the tools to design space.

In 1986, he met Jean-Marie DUTHILLEUL who had recently joined the SNCF (French Railways Authority) to develop an architectural design policy for stations. They immediately understood that they shared the same approach to projects: a rational and contextual methodology with particular attention paid to the use and identity of the setting.

The project for restructuring the Montparnasse station for which he was responsible served them as a laboratory. The project allowed them to form a team, an approach and an architectural vocabulary that they subsequently developed for the station programmes accompanying the Atlantic, North and then Mediterranean and East high speed train lines.

Together they created AREP in 1997, a company that brought together teams of architects and engineers within the same structure. The experience acquired with AREP in the study of exchange hubs – centres combining means of transport, movement and crowds of people – proved to be adaptable to a number of different fields: public buildings, city spaces and complex urban programmes.

Since AREP’s creation, the large number of projects carried out in other countries has allowed Etienne TRICAUD to adapt his design approach to new contexts, especially through partnerships with other designers: Hadi SIMAAN in Doha, Carlos ZAPATA in Ho Chi Minh City, CUI KAI in Beijing, Yves FENG in Shenzhen, etc.

Works and achievements

Non-exhaustive list

Casa-Port Railway station, Marocco
Aix-en-Provence Railway station, France
History museum of Beijing, China
Saint-Lazare Railway station, France

Bibliography

• Jean-Marie Duthilleul et Etienne Tricaud, AREP, introduction de Philip Jodidio, Les éditions Images Publishing, coll. "Master architect series", 2009, 248 p. (ISBN|978-1-86470-164-7)