Finding a place within transformation

MO: Our office is based in Saint-Ouen, specifically in the Puces de Saint-Ouen. We are in a big industrial building, a space that has been abandoned for a long time. It’s owned by the city and now hosts many entrepreneurs, artists, and graphic designers—young creatives working in this large, slightly rundown building. That’s what makes this place unique. We have about 60 square meters organised into three rooms. It’s a great opportunity to be here, even though it’s temporary. 

The city had plans for this site. It was part of the ‘Reinventing Paris’ competition, and the idea was to transform it into a cultural facility. That didn’t move forward, and the future of the building is still uncertain. For now, we enjoy being here.

In a way, the building mirrors what we do at Urbastudio: working with what’s already there, seeing value in the in-between, and accepting temporality as part of transformation.

Saint-Ouen has undergone a radical transformation in the last decade, especially in the last five years with the Olympic Games. The northern parts of Paris have changed significantly—half of the city is completely new.  I was born in Paris, moved around a lot, and eventually chose to settle both my home and office here. It’s a territory in motion, and I like that.

Learning from mentors

MO: During my studies, I had the chance to live and work in India, Chile, and Cambodia—contexts marked by strong social contrasts, rapid urbanisation, and often limited public resources. These environments pushed me to question conventional architectural responses, to value what already exists, and above all, to think at the scale of the city.

In Ahmedabad, India, I worked at the office of Balkrishna Doshi, who was later awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018. His practice embraced frugality, contextual sensitivity, and collective use, but what struck me most was his deep commitment to urban development. He wasn’t just designing buildings—he was shaping cities. In Chile, I focused my research on the work of Alejandro Aravena and his office ELEMENTAL. Their incremental housing model empowered residents to complete their homes over time—an approach that addressed social and economic constraints while reinforcing a sense of belonging. There, too, architecture served as a tool for structuring the city.

These formative experiences shaped my values: doing more with less, embracing existing conditions, and designing with and for local communities. They continue to resonate in the projects we develop at Urbastudio—projects anchored in the déjà-là, attentive to available resources and focused on long-term transformation at the urban scale.

Urban design vs. urban planning

MO: These early experiences abroad profoundly shaped my way of looking at cities. In India, Cambodia and Chile, I encountered architects who weren’t just designing buildings—they were actively shaping the city, engaging with urban scales, with questions of housing, economy, and informality. In contexts where resources were limited, I was struck by how much could be done with so little—how architecture could be a tool for resilience and equity.

That’s when I started questioning the boundaries between architecture and urbanism. I wanted to better understand how a project can engage with systems—social, spatial, infrastructural—and how we move from vision to built form. To explore this further, I pursued a Master's in Urban Design at UC Berkeley. The program brought together architects, landscape designers, geographers, and planners, offering a cross-disciplinary lens on how cities are made. It reinforced my desire to work across scales, to connect the strategic with the spatial, and to develop tools for more context-driven urban projects.

Urban planning and urban design are often conflated, but they serve different purposes. Planning sets a regulatory framework—through zoning, land use, environmental goals. Urban design translates these ambitions into lived space. It’s about making tangible choices—on density, public space, uses, edges—that shape how we inhabit a place. That’s where I position myself: at the intersection between systems and situations, long-term visions and everyday life.

A career in motion

MO: This shift in perspective—understanding cities not only through buildings but as complex, evolving systems—has strongly shaped the way I practice today.

After completing the program at UC Berkeley, I spent another year in San Francisco working at SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), before returning to France and joining Dominique Perrault’s office, where I worked for five years. In 2023, I launched my own practice, Urbastudio. It’s still a young firm, but built on 12 years of experience within large international offices.

At the same time, I joined Échelle Un, an incubator created by the Marne-la-Vallée architecture school. It was designed to help young practices get off the ground. Beyond the technical knowledge—public tenders, accounting, business strategy—it offered a precious sense of community. Instead of figuring everything out alone, we shared experiences, doubts, and tools. It was an important support system at a key moment, reinforcing a conviction I had long felt: that it is possible to do things differently. Less about ego or signature, more about responsiveness, frugality, and collective intelligence.

From site to city: A multiscalar approach

MO: A multiscalar approach now informs all our work. Today, all our projects are public commissions, and that means working with elected officials, technicians, and local stakeholders—sometimes residents. One of the main challenges is learning to communicate with people who don’t share the vocabulary of urbanism or architecture. How do you make a plan understandable and open to dialogue? This is part of what I enjoy: translating complex spatial issues into something tangible.

At the moment, we’re leading four main projects, all in the Paris metropolitan area. One is in Rosny-sous-Bois, on the eastern edge of the metropolis. The site brings together a large shopping mall, small-scale housing, grands ensembles, and a highway. It’s one of those messy, in-between landscapes typical of the 60s and 70s. With the arrival of the Grand Paris Express, and a new metro station just next to the mall, the area is now facing rapid transformation. The land is already fully occupied, but the pressure for redevelopment is high. Our task is to help the city define a vision and preserve a form of continuity.

Our work generally revolves around three key principles. 

The first is what we call déjà-là—the existing. We look at how we can use a site's existing resources to shape the project sustainably. Preserving what's already there is more sustainable than demolishing and rebuilding from scratch, and it also strengthens a place’s identity. Many of our projects are in areas with existing buildings and communities, so the challenge is how to reconstruct the city within the city—how to improve and enhance what’s already there. Often, these areas have been neglected, places where at first glance you might not see much value. But by exploring the site, walking through it, and engaging with residents, you start to uncover hidden qualities—sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. 

The second theme is the productive city. We often work on former industrial lands that have been emptied out. There’s a tendency to erase these uses or push them to the margins. But we believe they have a role to play in the contemporary city—especially if we reimagine them as hybrid, more ecological, and more integrated with public life. One of our largest ongoing projects covers 170 hectares in northern Paris, on the former PSA car factory site. It’s nearly the size of La Défense. The site used to be closed off, with almost no entrances. Now the challenge is to keep it productive, while opening it up—to landscape, water, mobility, and people.

The third theme is reconnecting cities with water—rivers, canals, and other bodies of water. This interest began during my master's in the U.S., where I studied how Portland’s riverfront could shape a more sustainable and vibrant city. Water is both a constraint and a powerful tool for designing more resilient and place-based urban strategies.

In Moret-Loing-Orvanne, near Fontainebleau, a canal could become a unifying thread between several historic centres. We’re guiding the integration of 500 new housing units on brownfield sites, while respecting the existing low-rise fabric In Bassens, near Bordeaux, our Europan project River (S)trips proposes a series of landscape corridors—ecological, productive, social—reconnecting a residential plateau and an industrial port divided by infrastructure In Lodève, part of the Quartiers de Demain programme, rivers and hills become structuring elements to reconnect fragmented neighbourhoods. In each case, water acts as a vector for frugal and rooted transformation.

Building consensus

MO: Much of our work today focuses on Plan Guides—strategic documents that help municipalities move from vision to implementation. They offer a shared framework to clarify what needs to be done, how much it will cost, and how to engage the public. This is a key step before land can be acquired, architects selected, and operations launched.

One major challenge in urban design is bringing together diverse stakeholders around a common vision. To do this, we often rely on physical models. We use them throughout the process—as working tools, not just presentation pieces. They allow us to test densities, adjust volumes, and explore alternatives in a tangible way. Models help translate the project for all—technicians, municipalities, and residents alike—fostering engagement and collective decision-making.

Urban design is not about imposing a vision, but about creating the conditions for collective action—where every actor, from citizen to planner, sees a role to play in shaping the future.