Working in the gaps

AP: One persistent issue in France is the centralisation of opportunities in Paris. It remains the country’s professional epicentre, which can be limiting. After COVID, some architects have moved to smaller cities like Bordeaux or Marseille—not exactly rural, but certainly outside the capital. Still, Paris continues to dominate, acting as both a national and international showcase. If you want visibility or to grow a practice, there's often a sense that you have to be here, which feels like a pressure, as if this centralised visibility was mandatory for opportunities - which is also a contemporary mechanism much reflected digitally on social platforms online.

This imbalance begins in education. Architecture and design schools, often under the Ministry of Culture, inherit a Beaux-Arts tradition that’s largely theoretical and historical, disconnected from practice. At my school, Paris-Belleville, there was little to no technical training—no AutoCAD, no real exposure to contemporary work. Teachers encouraged us to focus on traditional architectural figures, often dismissing more contemporary references of that time, like Koolhaas. As a result, students graduate with a romanticised idea of the profession and very few practical tools. 

This situation seems to have started to change for the next generation of students. People in my generation are now teaching, which naturally re-adjusts the pedagogical methodology and focus. 

Once out of school, there were two main options: follow the traditional path in an office, or explore alternatives. I was more drawn to the latter. We looked at practices like OMA/AMO that worked across disciplines—designing fashion shows, cultural projects, architecture—and saw potential in that kind of versatility. In Paris, we realised that much of the funding for creative work comes from cultural institutions and luxury brands. That ecosystem, though small and highly competitive, opened up new spaces for experimentation. We saw how a few large production companies were already operating at this intersection of architecture and event design, shaping spaces on a much broader scale.

A reality of their own

AP: After working a few years with Renzo Piano, I joined BUREAU BETAK with this curiosity in mind. They needed an architect for a large-scale project for one of their clients. That was the start of observing a different way to work and to find a reality of our own, even if school hadn’t prepared us.

I had friends who left the profession—some pursued further studies to become intermediaries between architects and clients, like advisors or an assistant à la maîtrise d’ouvrage: a negotiator. They thought they’d have more impact on the final outcome than just designing the building. I found that very interesting. This is something we try to hold onto: the architects’ capacity to orient, delimit, point to, or provide a viewpoint—quite literally offering a perspective on a situation or context. That’s why the projects we’re doing now often hover on this blurry boundary between designing and advising. It could be defined as something like creative direction, but with drawings and construction as the outcome.

For example, we design furniture sets to present collections and develop fixtures or hanging systems for exhibitions. These elements often travel to different locations, serving as pop-up stores, and eventually settle in the client’s office as showroom pieces. It’s a collaborative series of small-scale projects, all unified by a distinct identity tailored to each brand. Just as brands have long crafted visual identities, they are now increasingly interested in how they are represented in space. I often compare visual identity to spatial identity—an idea that tries to capture the dynamic of our work. We aim to understand how a client or brand expresses itself through architectural choices: materials, proportions, and uses. It’s a bit like when you enter someone’s home—you get to know them without talking by seeing a series of decisions or conditions that characterise that space. In a way, a brand is the ultimate character, and it has many homes.

Scaling down and reshape

AP: One of the first things I reflected on was the scale of the work—both physically and over time. Large projects like those at Renzo Piano’s office often take years to complete. The buildings are excessively large and complex, and the connection between architects and the final result can feel like a powerless story in a certain way—not exactly a lack of control, but a kind of obscured relationship. At that scale, clients are often buying a name, and star architects paradoxically end up selling their signature to buy creative freedom or influence. I’m not saying the architecture is bad, but the added value often leans more towards a sense of strange transactional branding of space. Coming from a school that was sceptical of architect celebrity culture, working in such an office felt like a contradictory choice. I remember Renzo reviewing a project and spending 15 to 30 minutes focusing exclusively on a tiny gesture—treating the building like a sculpture. There were amazing structural insights about how to build and use materials ambitiously and with great intelligence, but alongside that was this polished, poetic, valuable, almost virtuous way of shaping the work that I didn’t always feel comfortable with. 

I left that environment to find something more connected to other disciplines—something less traditional or boxed than architectural practices. I found the complete opposite in fashion set design: working on temporary construction with huge budgets but extremely tight deadlines and a sometimes absurd and wasteful way of building. This was something we integrated early as a positive challenge: how could we bring architectural thinking and an economy of means into the extravagant—and often contradictory—world of luxury fashion? We were fortunate enough to meet on some of these questions with our first client, Marine Serre, a fashion designer from France who has worked a lot with upcycling garments. She’s making couture dresses with bedsheets and using interesting approaches that we could easily translate or see resonating in architecture, design, furniture design, and objects.

So, we first started to do exactly what she was doing, basically mirroring her methodology into her own brand environment, upcycling elements and parts of objects, machines, and furniture from different eras to reassemble fixtures to present her collection in her showroom or stores. That evolved to other projects—we worked on a fashion show, or, rather, a fashion movie during Covid with her, where we did the production, set design, and conceptual research. This is genuinely how it began—rooted in doubts and observations about the current state of the profession. What struck us was that, in this particular context of this commercial and cultural circus of fashion and luxury. Paris becomes a true destination, drawing waves of people, especially during fashion weeks. We found ourselves in the midst of this energy, swept into a fertile economy that allowed us to take root. We embraced the opportunity and, over the first five years, gathered a rich and varied body of work.

More than a name

AP: I once read that Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis initially considered calling OMA “The Office of Dr. Strangelove,” or something along those lines. I believe a practice’s name should have some kind of hook or question in it. This is how AVOIR came to mind. I have to admit it’s a weird name, and I take full responsibility for that. But having a quirky or unusual name is probably also the purpose of actually having a name. Avoir, which means “to have” in English, brings us back to the root of our practice—grounding it in a basic, almost obvious conceptual and intellectual idea: life starts with just being. Then, what is having? What does it really mean? In other words, what is our direct relationship with this world? It’s the most open definition I could give to what comes just before architecture—the fundamental need to create is, I believe, driven by our basic relationship with life as it appears or as it happens, materially and temporally.

Avoir is also a transitive verb that you cannot use alone. It just does not exist by itself, which I think is also true about architecture. It’s interdependent and thus always correlated to something. You can “have an experience”, you can “have a cup of coffee”, you can “have a house”, but you can’t have nothing! Anything happening is the product of a set of causes and conditions.

Minimal means, maximum intent

AP: Our generation, which grew up exposed to the birth of so-called starchitecture as part of the evolution of advanced capitalism, is now trying to go back to a more humble or meaningful proposal of what architecture could be, scaling back on ego in favour of a model that promotes the work and production itself. I've seen it called “new pragmatism.” It’s just a much more tangible and obvious way of practising. It also seems to be much more honest.  This pragmatic attitude has really favoured the emergence of new practices because they construct a project much faster and with more solid intentions. We’re also starting to see a cohesive thread between practices. One can connect with other practices without even looking at their actual projects.

I think we really connect with the younger generation. And inside that, there are, of course, a few gestural notions that we have shared with other practices. One is upcycling or repurposing—the idea or acceptance that not everything has to be designed, that a lot of things are produced industrially off-the-shelf, and that most building materials are actually finished or semi-finished products. Even a finished product, something made and used for a specific purpose, could be easily repurposed or thought of differently. That is not only, I think, a smart idea, but it’s also automatically a way to produce or reproduce an aesthetic, a form of collective or ubiquitous style in and of itself. 

Something else that’s personally important to us is our love for industrial components. By industrial components, I mean things not designed by designers but designed purely through functional considerations and often hidden or not exposed. That has, of course, become a style in itself; in the same way brutalism is a style, industrial architecture or design is a kind of style. From the very beginning, we’ve used these industrial components, like composite aluminium lightweight panels, basically used for billboards. We expose their inner structure, revealing the language of fabrication that is traditionally hidden.

We try to approach materials for their physical properties rather than their aesthetic values, which may be a bit difficult to understand, but we have some examples that can speak for themselves.  We transformed a typical terrace into a space for post-yoga sessions for Nike, where people could unwind and take part in guided relaxation. The table was transformed into a dinner table, and the cushions went on the ground so that people could have dinner together. It was just the most cost-effective and smart way of raising the table. There’s also an aesthetic dialogue with that sort of approach, which is more comfortable for us.

Another example is this really enormous 200-square-metre inflatable floating barrier, traditionally used in Denmark to prevent flooding. These are filled with air and water and put up around buildings. We used them for the Craig Green fashion show in London in 2022. We had a tight budget and had to seat 250 people. We try to correlate the physical property of the material with the use of the space. The way we move in an urban context or space can be micro-observed within the material somehow. So, imagine 250 fashionable people sitting to watch a show. We wanted to connect them tangibly. When a person sits down or gets up, the seat moves, responds to pressure. Plus, the material is super resistant—even a knife couldn’t puncture it.

Another example is a rotating shoe display we designed for a Swiss luxury sport-fashion brand—functional, on wheels, yet inspired by a street shop we saw in India. Even when working within the tight framework of brand contexts, I look for openings to bring in outside influences and propose objects that resist classification—not quite furniture, not quite sculpture, but still purposeful. As it rotates, the shelves counterbalance the motion. It’s as refined as architecture, yet deliberately ambiguous in scale—and that ambiguity, I think, is a strength.

The intangibility of scale

AP: In terms of scale, if we take this idea of covering the spatial identity of a brand, what’s interesting is the elasticity of scale. You could design invitations for a fashion show—small objects that are iconic and incorporate architectural value or thinking—and also design the full space. So in one project, you have this tension between scales. Then we opened to furniture, a hybrid between office and home status for fixtures and furniture, developing hanging systems for garments, storage systems, seating, and tables. From there, we worked on travelling exhibitions and pop-up stores for some brands.

In 2022, we experimented with micro-architecture scale with a cabin project for RIMOWA, and in 2024, we finalised a permanent store in Rue de Grenelle, a 25-square-meter jewellery store. So I think we’re at that threshold of scale—or, let’s say, at the maximum scale that we thought could define our practice. So we are now, funnily enough, back at the initial question: Is this an architecture studio? Do we want to be? What opportunities and contributions could we bring to the architectural scene? Even though we see a proliferation of diverse, exciting practices, I wonder where our meeting point is? Could we find some common ground that is intentional and not residual? Something more than pragmatism, a set of intentions that, no matter how diverse practices evolve, bring us together into a conversation. I think that’s really needed.