BASE is a France-based studio known for its out-of-the-box thinking and unexpected design choices, often introducing challenges that can be overcome through play. Encountering an obstacle in a public space—one that invites engagement and risk-taking—creates a tension that can lead to moments of joyful liberation. A key aspect of BASE’s approach is putting trust in users and acknowledging them as active agents, capable persons who are welcome and able to participate.

Founded in 2000 by Franck Poirier and Bertrand Vignal, BASE has grown over the past 25 years into a team of more than 90 people across offices in Lyon, Bordeaux, and Paris. Their portfolio includes numerous surprising and intelligent projects with a pop or DIY sensibility, often incorporating interactive built structures. Their work fosters a dynamic relationship between public spaces and the people who inhabit them.

Without further ado, here is our interview with Poirier and Vignal.

Landezine: You use a couple of guiding design principles like mystery, immersion, narrative, seasons, and contrast, among others. One of the most important notions ingrained in your work is risk. You say that “Public space must be educational before being safe”, which doesn’t necessarily go in line with officials. By designing for risk, you risk as well. What is your experience?

Franck Poirier:
Back when we started the agency, we hesitated to call it “BASE” or “Agence Tout Risque” which is the French Title of the movie The A-Team.

Bertrand Vignal:
Before being a rational answer to regulations and technical matters, public space is an interactive place above all. At a time when people are withdrawing into themselves, public space is where human contact is made, where you can meet someone.

FP: Our job is to design public spaces and planning it is framed by a lot of rules: underground constraint, property law, land use, safety standards, environmental risks… We think that public space cannot just be an answer to those constraints, but also must tell a story, suggest a vision. Telling a story or a fiction to reconsider public space involves a risk that must be taken into consideration.  

BV: Yes, and we are looking to challenge a simple vision of just dealing with a technical problem. We aim to create a unique experience through a space that allows interaction and emotion.

FP:  Nowadays, public space is generally defined by cars, the excessive mineralization of the cities and some other urban standards. Our line of work lies on freedom of spirit. We value the risk as a positive element, leading to experimentation and freedom, especially for the kids. It could be the risk of not complying with rules, a cultural risk or even an environmental risk… But every rule becomes a creative opportunity. For instance, in a flood-risk area, the idea is to enhance the water throughout the designing process rather than avoid it. We are looking for an original emotion in the public space. Whether it’s aesthetic or spatial, we always try to design a site that allows the user to take risks that they couldn’t take somewhere else.

Landezine: Have you ever been held back by a client who thought a project was too risky?

FP: Barely, because we know the legal limits and we play with them. In fact, we push the risk right up to the legal limits. We know the rules of the civil code well enough not to break them. We work in close collaboration with engineering and safety offices to validate our choices.

Risk is very much a matter of understanding and apprehension. Once the risk is well understood and apprehended, and therefore visible, it becomes much less important and less of an obstacle. If the planning practice asserts a risk, respects the law and makes it visible, then there are no accidents.

We also put ourselves in risky positions, in the way we respond to invitations to tender and try to make project owners understand that risk is worthwhile. Thanks to recent studies on children’s health and well-being, it’s much easier today to make project owners, parents’ associations and certain schools understand the benefits of risk, that the children’s education, self-esteem and self-improvement depend on their appropriation or confrontation with risk.

BV: A balanced-risk education is essential because it helps develop self-confidence and encourages creativity. For us, balancing the risk is an essential value in urban planning. The notion of risk is based on the dynamics of learning or contact with nature, such as the presence of water, which represents “normal” natural and relational dynamics between humans in the public space, which are overshadowed by the technical response. In reality, this is a rather relative value: you can’t make children do swallow dives! Ultimately, the question of risk translates into a response to the illness of today’s society. How can the public space repair society’s failings, that is people who meet a little less, children who are perhaps sometimes over-protected by norms… and thus fight against the sedentary lifestyle of children and an over-sanitized world.

FP: For us, the landscape has an anchoring value and refers to a notion of nature that enables us to re-anchor human beings in their environment. Anchoring can play a role against stress, eco-anxiety, or the fact that we’re losing our relationship with the soil, with the earth. In this way, the landscape fights against uprooting. The forces of climate and nature, through their randomness, naturally involve a level of risk, which can also be a vector of connection and reconnection in the end. And the apprehension of risk should enable humans, young or old, to have tangible feelings, made up of emotions and surprise.

Landezine: This idea goes hand in hand with Permissive City (and permissible playgrounds). What is intriguing about your projects is that they seem like playgrounds for adults too – you design for people to engage and invite them to do something. I see your work more as a framework, a structure (also literally) putting less emphasis on the detail than on adaptivity. How do you design for the unexpected, serendipity?

FP: We create open spaces that can be freely appropriated. Our layouts are deliberately generous, but under-defined to allow a diversity of uses. A platform can be a bench, a stage, a resting place. We leave room for the unexpected. We don’t conceive public spaces with a final purpose, but rather as devices in the form of practicable spaces that offer the conditions to make something happen. In other words, the question of use and practicality is really our philosophy into the programming of landscaped and public spaces. We have a kind of methodology that relies in part on creating spaces that are open and freely enjoyed, often oversized, too big, a little hybrid and versatile, in order to generate unexpected practices. In fact, we’re trying to create a bit of margin, and freedom of occupation, so that residents can seize it and reinvent their own way of occupying the outdoors. We’re not necessarily interested in aesthetics (although there is a form of aesthetics), but rather in the potential uses that a project can bring out. We’re really in a “let go” posture. But in order to do this, we have to condition the space so that there’s a spatial quality in terms of shade, materials, objects… So we’re in a kind of search for attraction through generosity or mystery.

BV:  The idea is to create a permissive environment where residents can invent their own uses. The challenge is to combine freedom and safety. To sum up, we’ll always have an answer that leaves room for spontaneous, free appropriation, in addition to uses: it could be a large lawn, on which you have the physical freedom to move around, the freedom to do 10,000 times other things than the one expected, and where there’s a little less determinism in terms of gender, age, and so on. It’s about designing a little differently to break away a little from the school of deterministic uses.

FP: Undefined natural spaces are often places where nature is reclaiming its right. They are places where nature expresses itself freely, regenerates and reinitializes itself with the appearance of new plants, the most efficient and pioneering, those best adapted to an abandoned environment. These wastelands thus become the stage for a natural force in perpetual evolution. In a way, we transpose this phenomenon to the scale of human use, integrating this dynamic into the programming of undefined public spaces. These places bring something new, a freedom of use in the everyday life of the user.

BV: Yes, we could also see this as a parallel question to nature, an echo of freedom, of the natural divergence that always finds its way, its place. Nature is constantly reinventing itself, and this divergence is an interesting concept. Our projects seek to balance these different values, without emphasizing one aspect more than another. The key is to consider these differences and turn them into a strength for the public space. In these spaces, much more will always happen than we have anticipated: the unexpected is part their value. If the space allows it, unexpected events will emerge naturally: a kite-flying contest organized by children, the sudden appearance of a camel, a costume display by the senior citizens’ club… All these unforeseen situations feed the public space. If, as Franck mentioned, there is no anchor point – such as a podium or a proper square for gatherings – the risk is that these dynamics will fade away. The challenge, then, is to increase the length of time spent in these public spaces: how can we retain users? How can we prevent them from simply passing through, without really making these places their own? The question of time spent in public spaces is crucial.

Landezine: In general, looking at French public space designs, they express some sort of joie de vivre, less formal, less clean, more messy, more accessible. Do you agree and if so, where do you think this comes from – France nonetheless perfected the formal garden in baroque. 

BV: In France, I find public spaces to be very identified, almost over-designed, especially compared to other European countries. In France, there’s much less trust in the spontaneous dynamics of users. Everything is fenced and contained. If there’s a play area? It’s surrounded by a fence. What about a seating area? It’s precisely there and nowhere else.

FP: Yes, in France, we operate on a rather splitting system. We divide functions, flows, circuits and networks. This is rather obvious, for example, with the systematic addition of bicycle lanes. In Switzerland, the emphasis is more on sharing space, with a less fragmented approach. Their legislation is more flexible, favouring soft mobility for the most vulnerable users. In France, we are still in a logic of segregation between people and uses.

BV: That’s true. But there’s also a certain kind of freedom in French public spaces. There are two kinds of freedom: in France, people make spaces their own by sometimes bending the rules, by stepping over a fence to step on the lawn, for instance. This gives an impression of freedom. But in Denmark, for example, it’s apparently very free: there are no fences, but people strictly respect the implicit limits. There, the boundaries are more mental than physical. It’s a marked cultural difference.

FP: In France, we’ve also inherited a classical garden tradition, designed to embody a certain power – from the time of Louis XIV to today’s metropolitan areas. Space is structured and compartmentalized, sometimes leaving aside a more flexible, spontaneous approach. By way of comparison, in countries such as Germany and the UK, there’s a more natural relationship with public spaces. There, the layout gives a much greater impression of freedom than in France, where everything is more structured.

Landezine: Do you think there is a connection between Tiers lieux and Tiers paysage? 

FP:  Actually, that’s exactly what I was pointing out earlier. There’s a link, a connection, even if it’s not a straight one. It’s by taking into account these dynamics of renewal, which manifest themselves in what is forgotten or abandoned. It’s a bit like a dance where nature reclaims its rightful place. See that storm? It has the power to wake things up. This power is as powerful in plant nature as it is in human society. When spaces are left to regenerate naturally, it’s as if people themselves can reclaim and recreate links, take in hand a dynamic of life or relational power. This often happens through small associations or local initiatives, with local residents, neighbors or even an entire community.

It’s this ability to renew social ties that finds a real match in the way nature regenerates on wastelands, forgotten spaces, or “third landscapes”. These are areas where human intervention is minimal, such as the edges of railroad lines, wastelands or spaces along freeways, which Gilles Clément already mentioned in his work. There’s a kind of natural resilience that manifests itself in these spaces. And if we transpose this process to the human community, we can see that human associations can reclaim these spaces (like urban wastelands) to bring them back to life from a cultural angle, for example.

So there’s a kind of renewal phenomenon, a collective dynamic we can find in third-party landscapes and third places. The third landscape, however, remains a fundamentally natural space, regenerated by the forces of non-human life. On the other hand, third places, while regenerative in nature, are often framed by regulations, creating a risk of economic or institutional appropriation. In other words, third places can also become places for the production of human and even economic value. In the long term, this can lead to them being taken over by public or private authorities. Third places are often occupied by cultural or artistic associations that maintain them and keep them alive for a while until an urban project comes along to take them over. In this sense, they are less “free” than third-party landscapes, which are less subject to such repossession. But in both cases, the question of the sustainability of their system has yet to be integrated and invented into the city’s development model.

Landezine: Your logo reminds me of the Axt und Kelle, which is a group of travelling craftsmen in the German tradition. Is there a similar connection in French tradition?

FP:  Our logo, a lumberjack’s axe, was inspired by a text by Edouard André, a 19th-century landscape gardener, adventurer and botanist, who taught garden design at the Ecole Nationale d’horticulture in Versailles… For over 20 years, Edouard André communicated his travels and projects through the prestigious Revue Horticole, which he directed. He published many works, including “L’art et la science des jardins”. In a text for his magazine, he wrote about his approach to a commission to create a garden in the Orne region, where he evoked the idea that with a simple axe, by strategically pruning a woodland, you could create a magnificent garden. This reflects our approach to the void and the work of hijacking the pre-existing space: working with the existing restrictions and materials to shape living, adaptable places.

Indeed, we can also see a link with the logo of the Axt & Kelle (Axe and Trowel) German communities of travelers in the 70s and 80s, who grouped together like a brotherhood of nomadic companions, offering their services for reconstruction projects, based on the exchange of skills and their expertise in community initiatives. For our part, we’ve created a sort of micro-company, a landscaping agency that operates on a very horizontal model, a bit like a training centre. We work all over France and travel frequently. So there’s a possible analogy between their organization and ours, because our model is also very flexible, cross-disciplinary and supportive, and promotes a local social and cultural approach that tries to adapt to each context encountered.