A generation in context

AV: According to reports from the Ordre des architectes and the Ministère de la Culture, the number of architects registered with the Ordre has remained stable since 2010 at around 30,000, including the rate of new registrations. The culture of practising under one's own name is deeply embedded in France, with the architecte libéral as the dominant figure. What seems to have shifted in recent years is that figure itself, which has become more heterogeneous: practices are more varied, more collaborative, and the profession has significantly feminised. Newer agencies often have more partners, work extensively through collaboration, and assert more territorially grounded approaches. Social media has also allowed emerging agencies to become known quickly, where previously you had to wait to be published in a specialist journal to "exist." Beyond enabling visibility, social media has also directed attention towards more marginal subjects and given value to unbuilt projects. Young agencies, sometimes still without a commission, are now able to occupy a more significant place in the architectural landscape through the promotion of their approaches and projects. We share common preoccupations with our peers: the environmental crisis, an interest in the existing fabric, the search for a more rooted materiality, the question of housing. We are also at similar moments: accessing first public commissions in a context where they are becoming scarcer, hiring first collaborators, pursuing practices closer to local issues such as architecture residencies. These shared concerns connect us and give body to a specific ecosystem that can perhaps be identified as a "movement." These concerns also run through a large part of European architectural production, we feel equally close to what is happening in Belgium and in Spain.

Building a practice

AV: I studied in Spain, at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Granada (ETSAG), with a period at the École d'Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires de Paris-Belleville through the Erasmus programme. The Spanish education, marked by a technical and constructive approach and the search for a genius loci particular to the Granada school, and the French one, more theoretical and open to other disciplines, allowed me to understand the act of building in its physical and spatial implications as much as its social, environmental and political ones. My final years of study were devoted, through collaborations with the Granada school in workshops and publications, and through a research graduation project, to deepening this idea of architecture as a space of dialogue: a political practice capable of representing all actors and issues, from the local to the global, in the public interest. Once I finished my studies, the aim was to test these ideas through practice in an office. The economic crisis provided the context for building professional experience abroad: in 2011 I joined Colboc & Franzen & Associés (today COSA) on a Leonardo da Vinci scholarship, then moved to X-TU Architects. At the end of 2016, convinced that I needed a more personal engagement with practice, I registered with the Ordre des architectes.

My first commission arrived in 2017, the Casa RR in Baza, Spain, completed in 2019, for family friends. It was followed by other private commissions in France and Spain, not all of them realised, which allowed me to deepen my thinking about practice. Moving in 2018 into a coworking space through Plateau Urbain brought me into contact with other early-stage practices — bureau Forme, Boman, FCML, Vorbot — and other professionals: photographers, graphic designers, specialists in reuse and urban agriculture. Beyond the shared workspace, we had common concerns and looked for synergies through occasional collaborations. That collective dynamic profoundly enriched my practice and rooted it within a broader movement. In 2019 I gained access to my first two public commissions, both in the existing fabric: an architecture residency in the Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord focused on rural heritage, and a housing consolidation programme for Paris Habitat in HBM buildings. That same year, convinced that contemporary practice was inseparable from the question of the déjà-là, I returned to Belleville to complete a DSA Architecture et Patrimoine. Since then there have been further public commissions, competitions won — 27 housing units in the ZAC du Port in Pantin with Atelier Rita, 10 housing units in Boulogne-Billancourt, a student residence in Saint-Denis, a thermal rehabilitation of 7 towers in Bagneux with COSA — competitions lost, good collaborations, and several completed buildings. In 2023, the practice was recognised in AMC's Palmarès de 20 femmes architectes à suivre, and in 2025 in the Maison de l'Architecture d'Île-de-France publication Elles transforment. The agency now has four collaborators and continues to grow with the energy of a team, working across territories as different as Île-de-France, Andalusia and the Grand Est.

Methods & Tools

AV: Each project calls for specific tools and approaches. When we work on housing projects, plan research seems indispensable to us for bringing together uses and the relationship to the city. This initial approach is then tested iteratively against constructive constraints, territorial anchoring, orientation. In the existing fabric, we favour the diagnostic and a sensitive reading to understand the building in its history, its urban context and its constructive systems. The project accommodates itself to all of this, sometimes without making noise, sometimes through contrast. The shared BIM model is our primary tool. It allows collaborative work without hierarchy and produces images that bring us closer to constructive reality. Studying constructive systems through details from the sketch stage onwards is part of the practice: a plan, a volume, a constructive section. These are the basis of reflection for any project.

Four transversal themes

AV: The practice is interested in the ordinary as the resource that allows us to approach questions relating to the living environment of the greatest number — an ordinary that begins with the home, with housing; an ordinary in the service of users and the public interest. This preoccupation is nourished by four themes that run transversally across the agency's projects, the first of which we call the architecture des usages. With the user placed at the centre, architecture is no longer a finished object but an open process — a field of possible evolutions that accompanies the needs of its occupants over time. The aim is to foster multiple uses by developing a structural and constructive logic that allows for flexibility and reversibility, and that is capable of anticipating programmatic obsolescence. Closely related is the second theme, the vernaculaire contemporain: each project offers the opportunity to interrogate the collective imaginary in order to recover a poetics of the everyday. This is a constructive approach which, far from the figure of the architect-creator, takes its roots in a structural, material and aesthetic logic that anchors the project in its site and opens itself to the full diversity of possible appropriations.

The third theme, faire avec le déjà-là, recognises that intervening in the existing fabric raises a great number of questions — urban, economic, ecological, aesthetic, questions of identity. What should be done with the existing when its heritage value is not immediately legible? What are the keys to its renewal? How can an ordinary heritage be made attractive? Through a positive reading of the déjà-là, the aim is to reframe it through the lens of contemporary challenges. The fourth theme, co-conception and action-research, reflects the conviction that practising architecture today requires opening up to approaches that have until now been marginal. Integrating users into the design process requires the development of tools adapted to dialogue with non-experts — models, prototypes, virtual immersions, mind maps, cartes sensibles (experiential mapping exercises). It also means taking into account the needs of actors who cannot represent themselves: non-human actors with an interaction or ecological connection to the site, such as animal or plant species, whose presence and relationships must be acknowledged and negotiated from the outset of any project.

Three projects

AV: We recently completed the headquarters of the Fédération des Parcs Naturels Régionaux de France in Paris: the rehabilitation of a former piano workshop built in 1864, whose rear courtyard had been transformed into a concert hall at the end of the century. The project questions, on the one hand, the capacity of the existing fabric to adapt to contemporary uses and, on the other, the possibilities of an architectural language that, without overwhelming the existing, can assert itself to support the representational space that a national headquarters requires. Drawing on the experience the agency had built up through its work accompanying the regional natural parks, the project places itself in resonance with their territories: it shares their materiality — through the use of natural and raw materials sourced from the parks' resources — their craftsmanship — by integrating traditional techniques and trades — a sensitive approach to the existing — through an attentive reading of the déjà-là — and a culture of the collective — by fostering dialogue and user appropriation. This attention to appropriation, which is central to the practice, is also embodied in another project completed in 2025: the extension of a pension de famille (a supported residential dwelling for people in precarious housing situations) within an existing building in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Known locally as La Maison Grecque, this small early-twentieth-century building now accommodates five dwellings and two shared spaces. The studies were conducted in collaboration with the hosts, the current residents and the associations responsible for managing the shared spaces and garden. Interior and exterior arrangements, choice of finishes, and the economic strategy were all developed collectively in working sessions around 1:20 models and 1:50 plans. The result is an intervention respectful of the collective imaginary and attentive to everyday gestures: a colour that reconnects with the building's nickname, the reuse of stones from removed elements in the garden arrangements, a balustrade that accommodates a flower pot, a terrace that transforms into a stage for open-air concerts. At a different scale, in Pantin we are currently building 27 housing units and 3 commercial premises across two buildings in the ZAC du Port (delivery in early 2027), alongside Atelier RITA. This project, the first public design competition the agency won, in 2021, is one we care deeply about, as it concentrates the themes that drive us. The plan work prioritises apartments that take advantage of highly constrained plots to promote multiple orientations and the natural lighting and ventilation of every room. The constructive system is connected to the site: a post-and-beam precast concrete frame with reclaimed-brick infill that enters into dialogue with the Grands Magasins, a portside building constructed in 1930, situated across the street, but also with the écriture faubourienne of the neighbouring residential buildings. And finally, the search for a poetics of the ordinary through the integration of colour (balustrades, blinds), elements of use such as jalousies (louvred external shutters) to create intimacy within the loggias, and the use of reclaimed materials — tiles, interior joinery, sanitary fittings — to vary the interiors.

Current work and ambitions

AV: We are currently working on projects of varied scales and programmes: 10 collective housing units under construction in Boulogne-Billancourt; a thermal rehabilitation of 7 residential buildings from the 1970s in collaboration with COSA in Bagneux; the headquarters of Unifrance in a hôtel particulier in Paris; a substantial thermal and structural rehabilitation of a small six-dwelling building in Paris; and a student residence in Saint-Denis.

Running transversally through all these projects is the question of the ordinary and of architecture in the service of the public interest. The reappropriation of the Trente Glorieuses heritage through thermal rehabilitation is one of the new themes we are exploring with curiosity and pleasure, convinced that these interventions, which aim to give a second life to buildings that would otherwise have been demolished and which are beginning to shape the landscape of our cities, deserve far greater attention. And, of course, the development of the agency in Spain remains one of our ambitions!

A formative encounter

AV: At the architecture school in Granada, I studied with José María Romero. Drawing on references including Bruno Latour, Castoriadis, Deleuze and Guattari and Michel Serres, he offered studios outside the school walls and derives through the metropolitan territories of the Costa del Sol, working within a logic of collective conception, a very unconventional pedagogical approach for the time (2007). This teaching integrated the déjà-là, other living beings and existing social dynamics, crossing architecture, spatial planning, social sciences and environmental sciences. My collaborations with José María Romero extended throughout my studies — workshops, a research scholarship, my graduation project — and then into the beginning of my professional life: co-authored publications for the Fundación Rizoma and La Ciudad Viva, and joint entries to open competitions, including Guadalmedina in 2012. This teaching, and these collaborations, marked me deeply. They taught me the importance of the social dimension of architecture, of collective design processes, and the necessity of recognising that we are not alone on this Earth.

Teaching and research

AV: It is interesting to confront the agency's practice with other practices. Since 2022 I have been teaching as an associate lecturer at the ENSA Nancy, where I run a design studio in the first year and co-direct a design studio focused on housing in the third year. The exchange with students and colleagues, and the more theoretical research that comes with teaching, nourishes the agency just as the agency's projects help me build the teaching.

In addition, the agency has been interested in the problems of rural territories and has since 2020 been coordinating the programme Pour de Nouvelles Ruralités, which brings together the six parcs naturels régionaux of the Grand Est region. This programme, centred on architecture and landscape as means of action for addressing questions of living environment, aims to question rural territories through the lens of contemporary challenges. Among other formats, we have carried out 25 architecture and landscape residencies on a wide range of themes and have built a shared corpus of knowledge through regular publications.