● ARCHITECT’S ALPHABET ●

We like this letter. M for matter, material and materiality.

From one to the other there is only one step.

Matter has mass and occupies space in four possible states (solid, liquid, gas or plasma). The material has specific properties that explain its use for a specific purpose. Matter becomes material as soon as we consider making or building something. Materiality, finally, is the particular implementation of materials.

If the architecture of the XXth century expressed a globalized modernity, the techniques of the XXIst century testify to a society eager to reconnect with its roots.
And today more than ever, in the face of the outrage made to nature, the matter is ennobled while the material is corrupted because of its transformation.

The current challenge is less the search for plasticity than the need to preserve this raw material that has become a resource and whose character is no longer inexhaustible.

The discourse on architecture has thus shifted. Facades made of solid stone, raw earth or straw are worth less for the grain of their material than for their original territory of extraction and their carbon balance.

If this awareness is essential and common sense, the fact of announcing the mobilized sector and of resorting to the biosourced as material of construction cannot nevertheless justify alone the architectural quality of a building.

Frugality and resilience sound the injunction of a necessary sobriety and economy of the matter in response to an unsuitable overconsumption.

But we must remain vigilant so that these notions are not diverted from their meaning and instrumentalized to become subterfuges to a programmed impoverishment of architecture. If we try too hard to reduce the project to the bone, there will be nothing left.

Let’s make sure to keep the poetry, the music of the project, its materiality.

The materiality produces effects, ambiances, universes, atmospheres which depend on the materials used and their characteristics (brightness, transparency, flatness, roughness…) but which are not reduced to it.

The materiality refers to past experiences, memories, and triggers emotions, sensations and even feelings. Materials that one might think heavy, opaque, small can nevertheless produce antagonistic effects of lightness, transparency and grandeur.

The materiality summons the sensitivity of the material rather than its technicality. According to us, there is no good or bad material but undoubtedly clumsy or inappropriate ways to implement them.

Let’s end on a bubble of lightness. Like a house, a bubble is made up of a material (air) and materials (water and soap) which, when combined, create an exceptional materiality: lightness, brilliance, transparency, shapes, reflections and iridescence which do not leave one indifferent.

So let’s bubble!