How does the foreign reveal the familiar ?
Architecture starts as a fragment, it carries within it a series of operators : time, climate, gravity, the invisible, the human hand, the machine.
Neo-Ruins sees this state of transformation as its starting point to question : How does the foreign reveal the familiar? How does the familiar inform the foreign? It is from this unresolved tension that a new architectural language is built.
This practice unfolds across multiple scales, architecture, scenography, object design. Across each scale, the same gesture: recognizing in the fragment a form of renewal.
Method
The method proceeds in three steps: Scan read a context through its materiality, its inherited forms, its traces of use; Catalogue identify what exists, sort what can be reactivated; Graft introduce a foreign element, industrial, technical, contemporary, that comes into contact with what exists without merging with it. The metal scaffolding on the pisé wall. The threaded rod through the earth block. Hassan Fathy’s mashrabiya translated into a 3D-printed prototype. Excavated earth becoming an exhibition stele.
Research Projects
2026 NeoRuin I – The Marabout and The Silo, Architecture Residency, Art Omi, New York
The threaded rod through the earth block. The marabout reinterpretation holds tension within the industrial silo.
2026 Archéologies – Scenography/Exhibition Design, Fondation Dar Bellarj, Marrakech
The method made spatial: excavated earth becomes exhibition stele, metal scaffolding carries the archaeological fragment. The foreign device grafts into the existing place while holding artefacts.
2024 Bridging Ancestral Know-How and Post-Industrial Craft, Iaac-3dpa, Barcelona
A research co-written with Edouard Cabay and Alexandre Dubord, into the analogies between vernacular techniques and digital fabrication.
2024 Teixit, 3D-printed earthen prototype, IAAC/3dpa, Barcelona
The familiar informs the foreign: Hassan Fathy’s claustra logic, transmitted across generations, becomes the generative rule for a 3D-printed earthen wall.
2019 Atelier Ourika, Paris, France
A field research collective, A shared methodology for reading territory: fieldwork through multiple mediums.