On the Living

I first studied biology and geology. Before drawing buildings, I drew cells, leaf cross-sections, rock layers. I learned about the infinitely small, the mitochondria that produce a cell's energy, the photosynthesis that transforms light into sugar, the division that takes an organism from singular to multiple without losing any of its integrity. And I learned about the infinitely large, the plate tectonics that move continents, the volcanoes that create new soil, the ocean floors that open and close, the climates that shift over hundreds of thousands of years. Two infinities at either end of the same world, and between them, a narrow band where humans live. I believe all architecture inhabits this band. It is, in my view, the synthesis of these two scales. Too fine to be planetary, too massive to be cellular, it mediates between matter and territory, between molecule and climate. It is from this in-between that I came, without having changed vocations.

My grandfather had not studied the sciences. He was a farmer, he grew wheat. He watched the sky to know when to sow, he felt the soil between his fingers to know if it was ready, he knew the exact moment when the ears called for harvest. He did not name the processes, he practiced them. He taught me to love the earth. Not the earth as a romantic idea, the earth as matter to which one becomes attached because one devotes time to it, body, seasons. It is an education I have never forgotten. When I walk a construction site today, I sometimes think of him, of how he would have judged a soil, weighed a clod, assessed the quality of drainage. The farmer and the architect fundamentally have the same profession: both work the earth, both dialogue with what grows, both know that one never entirely controls the outcome. My grandfather taught me this humility before books did.

Two figures, later, continued this education. Haroun Tazieff and Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Tazieff descended into volcanoes, Cousteau dove into the ocean depths, and both spent their lives filming what most humans had never seen. As a child, I had their books and watched their documentaries with a passion that has never faded. Tazieff at the edge of Nyiragongo, observing the lava lake glowing in the night. Cousteau on the deck of the Calypso, narrating the corals and sharks with a voice one doesn't forget. These two men taught me something that school would never have conveyed: nature is both magnificent and dangerous, it deserves to be contemplated, respected, and sometimes feared. It is not a pastoral backdrop, it is a force that can welcome us as much as it can crush us. And it is precisely this ambivalence that makes it worthy of our attention. Tazieff and Cousteau actually worked together, on the Calypso, around underwater volcanoes. The two infinities they explored were in reality one. The living planet. The world as it is, unadorned.

For me, the living is not an ecological theme or a commercial argument. It is the building's co-author. The one who does not sign the plans but who decides, in the end, what the project will truly become. The architect proposes, the living disposes. A facade can be conceived down to the smallest detail, drawn for months, calculated by engineers: if birds find no refuge there, if insects do not lay their eggs there, if rain does not bring forth moss where it was not expected, the building remains frozen in its inaugural version and begins to die. A building that does not evolve, that welcomes nothing, that does not allow itself to be inhabited by what is not human, is an incomplete building. I believe this more and more deeply.

I recently went to Art'chipel, in Marseille, one year after delivery. The site's biodiversity is already at its peak. The old trees we preserved have grown denser. The zones we protected have become refuges. Residents tell me about the birds they observe from their balconies, the species that cross paths there, the songs that punctuate the seasons. The project, in so little time, has done what we only hoped for after several years: it has filled itself. Human density has not chased away living density. On the contrary, one enabled the other. And when I sat on a garden bench, in the shade of a protected tree, I listened to the songs surrounding me. Tourterelle turque, moineau domestique, serin cini, pie bavarde. The Merlin Bird ID app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, identified them for me in a few minutes. Four species, in the heart of Marseille, on a site we had simply accepted not to raze. Our work was not to build a building. It was to invite the site to continue its work, by offering it a framework.

In Revin, in the Ardennes, the Lycée Jean Moulin pushes this logic even further. The building hugs the mountain slope so closely, unfolds in grassed waves so near to the natural ground, that it almost disappears into the landscape. Seen from afar, one no longer sees the lycée, one sees a gentle deformation of the terrain. When one approaches, the building reveals itself, but without rupture. The vegetated roofs welcome local flora. The embankments extend into the plant cover of neighboring hills. Here again, the living does its work. The plant cover has colonized the building over the years, as it would have colonized an abandoned quarry or forgotten earthwork. Architecture becomes a substrate, a support, an offering to the landscape. The built accepts effacement so that the place remains itself.

At Cristal, it is another form of dialogue with the living that has been forged. This time we did not wait. The refuges, we prepared them carefully, designed them into the facade to welcome birds and hope for their arrival. And they came. They nest in the interstices, they occupy the surfaces, they appropriate the building in their own way. We had extended our hand, they took it. It is an unwritten pact between species sharing the same volume, but a pact prepared, intended, awaited. And it is, I believe, the most beautiful success a building can achieve: not only to be inhabited by the humans for whom it was designed, but to become a fragment of ecosystem for inhabitants we explicitly invited to join the work.

I have had the chance, on several projects, to exchange at length with Patrick Blanc. The botanist who made the vertical garden a scientific discipline and a living work. Our conversations are among the most precious I have had in my professional life. Patrick masters knowledge that few architects possess. He knows which plants coexist, which suffocate each other, which feed off one another, which withstand cold, which tolerate drought, which bloom in shade. He knows how to read a wall as one reads a score. Where I see a facade to dress, he sees a community to compose. Each time I have worked with him, I have measured the gap between what I thought I knew about the living and what one must truly know to practice it. It is a humility that is precious to me. And it is also a recognition: an architect who claims to bring the living into his work without allying with botanists, ecologists, biologists, does amateur work. The living is not decreed, it is composed.

One must be an epicurean to love and understand nature. It is a conviction that came to me with age. Nature is often associated with ascetics, with monks, with contemplatives who would have renounced the world to better listen to the trees. I believe exactly the opposite. Nature is a matter for pleasure-seekers. To love the living is to love eating, drinking, smelling, touching, looking. It is to love the seasons because they change the fruits, the climates because they change the wines, the soils because they give different tastes to the same plant. The living is a feast, and only those who have a taste for feasting can truly appreciate it. Ascetics respect it, but they fear it a little. Epicureans celebrate it by eating its fruits. Perhaps that is why the best landscape architects I know are also good cooks, good drinkers, good sensualists. Nature nourishes them in every sense of the term. When one dines with Patrick Blanc, one speaks of plants, projects, wines, recipes, music and art. It is the great lesson of a great epicurean.

But what interests me beyond the feast is what the living teaches architecture. All the architectures I admire evolve. They patinate, stain, become invaded, allow themselves to be reclaimed. A facade that remains impeccable thirty years after delivery is a dead facade. A facade that yellows, greens, allows itself to be colonized by moss, a climbing plant, a family of birds, is a facade that has accepted to live.

I think of Geoffrey Bawa's hotels in Sri Lanka, Heritance Kandalama in particular, set against a cliff and progressively swallowed by the jungle to the point of disappearing into its site. One no longer knows, seen from afar, where the forest ends and where the building begins. I think of the vertical garden of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel with Patrick Blanc, which moves me every time I pass by. A facade that is not dressed with plants, but that is a plant. Eight hundred square meters of vegetation stretched on a Parisian wall, dialoguing with rain, sun, seasons, passersby. I think of ACROS Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall, designed by Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz, whose fifteen vegetated terraces climb the building like a green mountain in the heart of the city. More than thirty years after its delivery, what was a hundred species has become a true urban forest. The building has aged by densifying, like an undergrowth.

These three architectures have something in common. They do not hide behind nature to be ecological, they accept that nature is their co-author. They allow themselves to be transformed by it. It is the great difference between a finished architecture and a living architecture. The first is a photograph. The second is an organism. And an organism, by definition, does not remain identical to itself. It grows, it transforms, it allows itself to be damaged to better repair itself.

My biology studies taught me an essential thing. The living is never in equilibrium, it is in dynamic equilibrium. It maintains itself by transforming, it endures by evolving. A cell that stops producing energy dies. An ecosystem that stops evolving disappears. A soil that stops moving becomes sterile. Permanence, in the living, is an illusion. All apparent permanence is in reality a flow of transformations that compensate each other. I believe the most durable buildings are those that have understood this lesson: they do not endure by remaining identical, they endure by allowing themselves to be transformed. It is exactly the opposite of the classical architectural dogma that wanted frozen, timeless buildings, indifferent to time. The living teaches us that the timeless does not exist. There are only buildings that accept mutation and buildings that refuse it. The former age well. The latter deteriorate. It is the dimension of the profession I find most fascinating now: not to draw perfect objects, but to draw organisms capable of mutation.

I know what I am opposed with in meetings, and I hear it at every project. Nature costs money. A vegetated facade requires maintenance that many condominiums and operators prefer not to assume. It is the objection that comes up most often, and it is partially true. But it is almost always formulated by people who have not learned to count otherwise than in the very short term. A rooftop park costs a gardener. A vertical garden costs botanical monitoring. An urban pond costs ecological vigilance. All these costs exist and they are perfectly quantifiable. But if they are compared to the value they produce, the calculation becomes embarrassing for skeptics. A living facade increases property value, lowers energy consumption, retains tenants, attracts investors sensitive to ESG criteria, gives the building a visual longevity that an industrial facade will never know. Nature, in architecture, is not an expense item, it is an asset. And like any asset, it requires maintenance proportional to what it yields. Ceasing to see it as an aesthetic whim to see it as a productive investment is probably the intellectual leap that the real estate industry has not yet quite made. I spend my professional life demonstrating it, project by project, estimate by estimate. With some successes, and many battles.

These battles, I also wage within my own profession. My role as architect, as I advance, increasingly resembles that of a director. The director does not perform. He does not speak the text, he does not make the audience cry, he does not reap the applause. He proposes a framework, a lighting, a rhythm, a reading. But it is the play itself, it is the actors, it is the audience that make the work. And each performance is different, because no live show is exactly the same two evenings in a row. That is what architecture of the living is. A proposed framework, a suggested reading, and a work that replays itself each day with other actors: time, climate, vegetation, inhabitants, birds.

There is something there that profoundly moves me. The architect is only one of the participants. Not the master. Not even the principal author. Just the one who wrote the first scene, in a play that will last longer than his own life, and that will be performed by actors whose names he does not yet know. Perhaps that is, finally, what making a work means. Preparing a theater that others will bring to life.

— Manal Rachdi