‘His purpose was to get closer and closer and closer.’
John Berger
1. To help.
Our job is to help others to inhabit or even dwell- while constantly questioning how that’s possible.
Making architecture is an act of empathy and generosity.
We don’t believe in competition, we practice collaboration.
We don’t have clients, we work with dwellers.
It is not a service, it is working together.
It is not a business, it is a modus vivendi.
It is not a career, it is a journey.
We must be useful to others and to the biotopes we transform.
From now on, constructions without ego and with love.
Constructions that really welcome and help life.
As someone once said, ‘everything is bullshit but the open hand’.
As a friend once told us, ‘you will not get far, you’ll get closer’.
We build buildings, but we also build hope.
2. To build.
Our job is to transform matter, energy and information into inhabitable structures, for today and for a thousand years time. By critically facing social and ecological challenges, and eventually recalibrating them, we architecture materials and fluids where people can feel better. This is so for the whole construction lifecycle: from our collaborators to the builders, the inhabitants and the whole biosphere.
Each commission, research, camp or studio assignment unveils new needs and hopes, that we question through projects, systems, shelters and tutorials. Sometimes we unbury a lost craft; sometimes we lean on and interpret the arkane tacit knowledge of local builders; sometimes we must research and develop specific techniques and tools for them, by iterating and eventually innovating (invenit).
Our job is to think and to make (fecit), so others can build and live more easily. Our goal is clear and simple, the way is complex. We devote our quality time to this. Independence and freedom are our allies.
3. To save.
We urgently need to shift from being predators and parasites to a symbiotic relation with nature. In order to achieve this, our priority is to borrow sources -matter, energy and information- that have not been transformed by man yet: sun, wind, rain…
We work with what’s at hand. Learning from local builders -their craft and obsolete, inefficient skills- and our collaborators’ knowledge and ethos, we strive to create an informal network that’s bigger than us, and will outlast us.
Our challenge is to build what’s enough to fulfil somebody else’s needs and hopes -learning to do without- leaving no waste whatsoever and with a positive ecological impact.
We turn shit into manure.
4. To improve (from and for an environment).
There are no constraints, only possibilities. Every obstacle on the way is a chance to improve. We also build knowledge -when to be certain, when to doubt, when to build, how to build- and practice mutual learning.
