Exchange with Goldsworthy

What struck me wasn't a photograph. It was a small moment of happiness, a warm afternoon in Provence, at Château La Coste. We were walking down the path with my wife and children, tired from the sun, when we came upon Oak Room. A simple opening in a dry stone wall, almost invisible. You enter, and the coolness takes you immediately. Inside, twelve hundred oak branches interwoven into a vault, without any fixings, held only by their own logic. A nest carved into the hillside, at once tomb, shelter, inverted root. My children fell silent, which is rare. My wife smiled. We stayed there, for a long time, breathing that air cooler than outside, watching the light filter through the branches. One of his most accessible permanent installations in Europe, and one of the most right I've ever walked through. Everything I love about architecture was contained in that silent room: a minimal gesture, a raw material, a recovered climate, and the simple happiness of a family that stops.

I've never met Andy Goldsworthy. But I believe I had, looking at his photographs and walking through Oak Room that day, a long conversation with him. A one-sided conversation at first, then less and less so, as I understood what his gestures were telling me about my own profession.

Goldsworthy works in seconds. He places leaves sewn one by one with pine needles, he stacks ice in spirals at daybreak, he lines up pebbles on the crest of a wind-beaten rock. And he knows, as he places the last element, that the tide, the thaw, or simply the night will erase his gesture before he sleeps. The photograph is the only vestige. The work itself has already returned to the world by the time we look at it. I, conversely, build what will last a century, I sign permits whose volumes will remain standing long after the death of my clients. At first glance, we don't do the same work. He celebrates disappearance, I resist erasure.

But the gap closes as soon as we change scale. On a geological scale, my buildings too are leaves placed on the shore. The Arbre Blanc, in five hundred years, will be only a trace in the municipal archives of Montpellier. Mille Arbres, in a thousand years, will be only a rumor in the memory of Paris. Goldsworthy didn't invent the ephemeral, he simply shortened the focal length. He made visible, in a single day, what my buildings will take centuries to reveal. His speed is a pedagogy. And his Oak Room, paradoxically, says the same thing in reverse: a work that endures, but made of branches that will eventually return to the earth. Permanence as a granted reprieve, never as a challenge.

I remember my grandfather, on the beach at Mehdia, watching the sea erase my footsteps. I was a child, I was annoyed that my traces didn't hold. He had said to me, without dramatizing: *nothing remains except what the sea decides.* That phrase stayed with me while everything else from that day dissolved. I believe I build with it, without always knowing it. Each time I design a building, there's somewhere deep inside me a little boy from Mehdia wondering how long the sea will let it stand.

What Goldsworthy taught me, without wanting to and without knowing it, is that the architect who thinks himself permanent becomes ridiculous. All built work is ephemeral, it's only a question of timeline. The pyramid, the cathedral, the skyscraper, the garden pavilion: they differ by their duration, not by their nature. And since the choice of duration is, at bottom, the only true ethical choice of the architect, we might as well make it consciously. Choose the calendar of the living, which transforms, which grows, which dies and which returns. Choose materials that will know how to age, to patinate, to let themselves be reclaimed by rain and moss instead of resisting them. Choose structures whose obsolescence is not a catastrophe but a return. That, for me, is building with the living: accepting that the work is lent, never owned.

I see too many architects do the opposite. They design buildings that want to be eternal and which are, in truth, catalog objects designed to age badly. They dress concrete with composite panels that will yellow in ten years, they stack glued glass that can't be dismantled, they sign spectacular silhouettes that no one will know what to do with in forty years, nor how to repurpose them, nor where to bury them. They confuse permanence with posture, and the authorial gesture with responsibility. This isn't architecture, it's commercial sculpture that has forgotten it weighs tons and that one day, we'll have to answer for it. The true courage of the contemporary architect isn't to defy gravity or norms, it's to accept that his work may not survive him, and to conceive it anyway as if it must serve.

This doesn't mean giving up on duration. I continue to design buildings that must stand for a century, because that's what the city, the economy, the responsibility I owe to those who will inhabit them demand. But I do it now without illusion about permanence. A building that lasts is a building that negotiates well with its era, not a building that claims to transcend it. The best way to last, paradoxically, is not to aim for eternity.

The architecture of life, the architecture of the work, the architecture of the real. Three different calendars, three scales of time that overlap in each project. The life of an inhabitant, which lasts a few decades. The work of an architect, which lasts a few centuries. The real of a site, which lasts a few millennia. My profession perhaps consists of making them coincide for an instant, of offering a meeting point between these durations that ignore each other. Goldsworthy does the same thing, but on the scale of an afternoon. That's how we speak to each other, he in his Scottish moor and I before my plans, without ever having crossed paths.

Matter belongs to no one. We pass through it, we arrange it for a moment, we return it. Goldsworthy understood this with leaves and with twelve hundred oak branches placed on the flank of a Provençal hillside. I'm learning it, more slowly, with stone, wood, concrete and steel. But it's the same lesson, and perhaps it's the only one that matters., Manal Rachdi