RESOURCE / RE‑USE

Starting a project from the resource reverses the traditional steps of urban, landscape, and architectural design by placing the inventory of the existing environment as a prerequisite to drawing. This approach is both pragmatic and poetic. It invites drawing from what already exists in order to design, thus favoring a contextual, rooted, and sustainable aesthetic.

The resources of the existing environment include all site data: ecosystems, geology and its materials, hydrology and water resources, climate, craftsmanship, traces, and memories...

This approach responds to contemporary ecological and social challenges, where the act of building can no longer ignore the limits of natural resources, and the stories embedded in materials.

In this approach, reusing materials in the making of the city represents a major aesthetic challenge, encouraging deep reflection on how urbanism and architecture should be conceived. This challenge goes far beyond the simple recovery of materials; it involves reinventing forms, uses, and functions. Rethinking design from the resource requires a creative and flexible approach, where imagination and ingenuity serve sustainability.

Integrating reuse encourages viewing materials not as fixed objects disconnected from their history, but as elements carrying a collective memory, witnesses to a past era or function. This leads to an aesthetic of imperfection and authenticity, where each object or material has a story to tell, and the art of their assembly becomes as important as their form or texture.

In places like Ablon-sur-Seine, Saint-Brieuc, Cherbourg, Bonneuil-sur-Marne...