On Generosity in Architecture

There is a word that architects use frequently and that few of them truly practice. Generosity. We invoke it in project descriptions, in conferences, in press releases. We write it in golden letters on agency brochures. And yet, when we look at actual production, most contemporary buildings are miserly. Miserly with space, miserly with shade, miserly with ceiling heights, miserly with views offered to the city, miserly with everything that cannot be immediately monetized. Generosity has become an advertising word. I want it to become a practice again.

For it to become a practice again, we must start by defining it. Generosity in architecture is not a supplementary touch of soul added at the end of a project to soften a balance sheet. It is not an extra balcony, a plant per floor, a wooden panel on an otherwise banal facade. Generosity is a posture that precedes drawing. It decides, even before the first sketch, to give more than is asked, to propose what no specifications anticipated, to take the program's money and return part of it to the world. It is a political choice before being an aesthetic choice. And it is a choice that is paid for, almost always, in lost square meters, reduced margins, technical complications.

**Giving space.** The first generosity is spatial. It consists of offering inhabitants more surface area, more height, more volume than immediate profitability would justify. A deep balcony rather than a regulatory balcony. A through living room rather than a blind one. A 2.80-meter ceiling rather than 2.50 meters. These differences seem minuscule on a plan, they are enormous in life. At Arbre Blanc, designed with Sou Fujimoto and Nicolas Laisné, balconies measure up to seven meters deep. This is not an architect's whimsy, it is a societal choice: we decided that these apartments would breathe, that their occupants could sleep there in summer, dine there with six people, live outdoors part of the year. The deep balcony is an additional room offered to the climate. It is a square meter that does not cost much to build and that changes the way of living.

**Giving city.** The second generosity is civic. A building does not merely shelter its owners, it participates in a collective space that exceeds it. How many office towers have a closed, opaque, intimidating ground floor that repels passersby like a city wall? How many residential buildings offer the street a succession of gated lobbies, parking lots, technical rooms, cleanliness signs? At Mille Arbres, we did the opposite. Above the périphérique, which has never been a public space, we placed a public park. A true continuity of ground that crosses the urban highway and returns it to the city. What was a border has become a seam again. What was an urban wound has become a garden where one walks, sits, passes through. Giving city means accepting that the building does not stop at its property line, that it extends the metropolis and sometimes repairs its oldest wounds.

**Giving climate.** The third generosity is ecological in the primary sense of the word. Offering shade when the sun beats down, wind when air stagnates, coolness when the city overheats, light when winter extinguishes it. With Art'chipel in Marseille, we made the simplest and most radical choice: not to cut. The site was wooded, generously planted with old trees. Rather than leveling and rebuilding, we inserted housing into the existing voids between trees. The woodland was preserved, completed, sometimes protected by areas where nothing was built at all. The built environment weaves through, it does not impose itself. Today, the site's biodiversity has multiplied. Birds nest there and offer inhabitants the music that no architect knows how to draw. This is a generosity I find particularly moving, because it does not belong to us. We only left room.

**Giving sight.** The fourth generosity concerns what a building allows to be seen, and to whom. A fully glazed facade is not generous, it is exhibitionist. A blind wall is not either, it is defensive. True generosity of sight consists of organizing precise visual exchanges, allowing inhabitants to see the city, passersby to see a bit of the life happening inside, without anyone being deprived of their privacy. At the Bâtiment d'Enseignement Mutualisé at Polytechnique, in Saclay, designed with Sou Fujimoto, we multiplied controlled transparencies between classrooms, circulation spaces, interior patios. A student walking in a corridor sees others' work, without disturbing it. A teacher catches sight of a seminar room they are not part of, and perhaps it suggests an idea. Generosity of sight is architecture that makes curiosity possible.

**Giving time.** The fifth generosity is the rarest and most difficult. It consists of designing buildings that will endure beyond their intended uses, that can be transformed without being destroyed, that will accommodate programs we have not anticipated. At Ecotone Antibes, under construction in Sophia Antipolis with Jean Nouvel, we are designing an "inhabited hill" of forty thousand square meters wrapped in twenty-seven thousand square meters of vegetated spaces. More than a tertiary campus, it is an ecosystem that will change with the seasons, that will enrich over decades, that can accommodate tomorrow uses we have not imagined today. The building levitates above the ground to protect itself from road noise and free the natural terrain. Its structure is designed to last long, its vegetation to flourish slowly. A building generous in time is a building that credits the future. It accepts not resolving everything immediately, because it knows that others will come after us, with other needs, other dreams, other climates. Thinking of the building as a legacy rather than as a finished product is perhaps the most accurate definition of the responsible architect.

**Giving a second life.** The sixth generosity extends the previous one. It consists of refusing the ease of demolition, of viewing what already exists as capital rather than as an encumbrance. In 2010, for a competition of ideas in Calabre, we proposed transforming the pillars of a highway viaduct into housing, shops, an art center, a living place. A massive, brutal, ungrateful infrastructure became an inhabited vertical city. A spiral wrapped around the pillars improved inertia. The bridge decks thickened to accommodate public spaces. Rainwater was stored in tunnels, transformed into energy. One era's waste became another's resource. The project won the competition of ideas but was not realized. Yet the idea has never stopped following me since. The sustainable city of tomorrow will not be built only with new buildings. It will be built mainly by transforming the existing, by inhabiting the ruins of the industrial age, by making viaducts, wastelands, obsolete offices the raw material of a new urban generosity.

I see too many architects doing the opposite of all this. Buildings calculated to the strictest measure, where every square meter pays, where balconies are 1.40 meters because the norm requires it and not a centimeter more, where ground floors are armored against passersby, where facades are closed to save on glass, where ceiling heights are shaved to gain a floor. That architecture is technically correct and humanly miserable. It obeys rules, respects budgets, delivers on time, and produces cities that no one loves to inhabit. Generosity, in this context, is not a luxury: it is the vital minimum. What is missing for a building to cease being a product and become a place again.

Generosity has a cost, I do not hide it. A seven-meter balcony instead of two is a balcony that is not sold but lived. A double vegetal skin is an investment that does not pay for itself in five years. A public park above the périphérique is less commercial surface. And yet, I am convinced that these expenses are the most profitable an owner can make, provided they accept measuring profitability differently than in euros per square meter. A neighborhood where people love to live gains value. A building in which people feel good rents better and longer. A city that breathes attracts inhabitants, talent, commerce. Generosity is not the enemy of economics, it is its long-term version.

But I believe there is, more deeply still, a reason that transcends the economic argument. The architect who builds in a city uses a good that does not belong to them: the ground, light, sky, view, air. These resources, they borrow from the commons to serve a private program. Generosity is the way to return part of what was taken. It is the moral counterpart of the right to build. Without it, architecture becomes appropriation. With it, it becomes again what it should always have been: a contribution to the common world, a civic act, a gift made to those who asked for nothing.

This is what I try to practice, project after project. But I want to be honest on one point: generosity is never delivered alone. It is the result of a fragile alliance between associate architects who share the same requirement, owners courageous enough to accept losing a bit of immediate profitability for long-term value, and political officials who want something else for their territory than an alignment of standard operations. Without Sou Fujimoto, Nicolas Laisné, Jean Nouvel, Bjarke Ingels, Kengo Kuma, my teams at OXO and all those with whom I work, half of what I have just described would never have existed. Without operators like Compagnie de Phalsbourg, without communities ready to defend ambitious projects, without elected officials who believe their city deserves better than minimal specifications, nothing would come out of the ground. Generosity is a discipline, not a state. It is worked on, defended, negotiated against economic, normative, political pressures. It is often lost along the way, and we must fight, together, to save what we can of it.

This is why I fight for an augmented architecture. An architecture capable of delivering more than what is asked of it, that adds to the program what the program did not know to request, that returns to the world part of what it borrows from it. This is, ultimately, what distinguishes architecture from mere construction. Construction responds to a commission. Architecture, it augments the commission., Manal Rachdi