The Tree and the Swing

THE TREE AND THE SWING

by Éric Garandeau.

"Less is more, less is the power of nature, nature is the power of imagination" is the new lingua franca in which Manal Rachdi sets out his mantra and reveals his international ambitions. The little blue book, which brings together the work of his agency, OXO Architectes, concludes with the phrase, "Architecture of frugality and resilience, the future of architecture is nature." Manal Rachdi welcomes visitors to the Café Beaubourg, in front of the public square given to Parisians by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, but it's easier to imagine him under an oak tree, or any other tree.

"Less is more" is a phrase borrowed from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the founder of architectural minimalism and short-lived director of the Bauhaus, yet Manal Rachdi is not to be found in the minimalism that destroys the identities of modern capitals, or in the opportunistic union of architect and industrialist. It is not the less but the more that interests him. If Nature uses the minimum of energy and matter, it is to produce the maximum of effects, to explode into spectacular and generous forms, from coral reefs to boreal taiga and the canopies of Langkawi, Daintree, Amazonia…

People have hung a swing from this tree, the swing of the child who will become an architect in Terrence Malick's film; the swing of Roubachof drawn by Arthur Koestler. Yes, humankind has been swinging; for several centuries, it has been playing at scaring itself, swinging from one extreme to the other, swinging back and forth in the hope of not ending up hanging from the prop of its vertigo.

Not content with having freed ourselves from all our natural predators, we love to fall into our own traps, inventing an infinite number of them, and we can have fun linking them together, going all the way back to the myth of Daedalus, lost in his own labyrinth after helping Pasiphae give birth to a monster, the Minotaur. How is Daedalus the embodiment of modern man? It is because humankind finds technical solutions to simple problems, which leads it away from the laws of nature to create ever more complicated problems that require ever more complex and technical solutions, ad infinitum. Daedalus was clever, the father of all engineer-architects – he designed flying machines before Leonardo da Vinci – but the gods had fun making his life impossible in order to punish him for his hubris. The wreckage of his inventions is accumulating at the bottom of the oceans, with plastic moving up the chain of life, fossil fuels raising temperatures, and information technology depleting rare earths. Will silicon save carbon-based life? Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly provide the ultimate solution to all our accumulated problems, but the wisest scientists fear that, applying the rule of Ockham's razor, the machine will choose the simplest solution, i.e. the elimination of the original problem: humankind (whose self-description as 'Homo sapiens sapiens' makes the beta version of a certain ChatGPT laugh out loud). Just as nuclear power rhymes with the fields of Armageddon as well as with solar fields that can be harvested ad infinitum, it is hard not to see the 'world's largest rocket', designed by SpaceX, as the embodiment of the Icarus dream, which we know will end scattered in the atmosphere like a jigsaw puzzle.

Le Corbusier used to say that "the studio is made of space, light and nature", but the fine modernist roadmap has burned up in the industrial fumes of cheap functionalism that makes good business sense for developers. The only thing that makes 'Cities' shine and flourish are the names chosen by councillors practising a novel language worthy of George Orwell. Gone are the garden city ideals of the nineteenth century; forgotten are the hanging gardens of Babylon. All too often the urban alternative lies between overcrowded, anarchic favelas and entrenched, sanitised condominiums, separated by a river or a polluted beach. The European and Mediterranean city still exists, and Italy has managed to preserve it, but France has surrendered to the diktat of roundabouts, housing estates and franchise cities. "Standardisation is a rolling mill that grinds your soul to the bone," says the poet and architect Rudy Ricciotti.

Manal Rachdi is equally scathing with regard to the defence of trees: "If trees gave us Wi-Fi, we'd plant more of them. It's a shame that trees only provide oxygen." But his manifesto is to be found in action rather than in words, in what he constructs at the crossroads of the philosophical and the political, for this is the position of the architect who inherits this turbulent history, industrious and standardising, overloaded with symbols, adventures, excesses and mistakes. They are no longer asked simply to build, but to repair, to make the world more habitable and 'sustainable', to correct its defects. In order to cope with the complexity that has accumulated over the centuries, architects should take the time to think things through, to take the sideways step that allows them to experiment; but no, they are forbidden to get off the swing that continues to oscillate between zero and infinity. Once on board the centrifuge of modernity, the big drunken boat that sways from one side to the other, the architect has to draw the plans and maps, give the orders, supervise the site, apply the procedures and rules, then transgress them, circumvent them. They are at once poet and politician, thinker and builder, protester and accomplice, as flexible as a reed and as resistant as a brick.

It is this choice and this struggle – or this non-choice and this capitulation – that distinguishes the 'good architect' from the rest. Renzo Piano: "If you don't have this strength, which also has a moral dimension, if society doesn't frighten you, you're just an idiot. That's the whole point."

Manal Rachdi's fear is that of the generation born after what we have just described, after the war, after prosperity, after the crisis; a crisis so unending that it is no longer a crisis but a great disorder, an entropy as indefinable as the Middle Ages, in which the remnants of antiquity floated – Imperial, republican, in the midst of city-states, religious orders and barbarian tribes – in a great confusion of ideas and organisations, to the rhythm of migrations, invasions, wars, epidemics and all sorts of vital threats that we find intact: this is our neo-medieval world.

Immovable and rooted in the eyes of the hurrying, hurried and bustling humankind, in the inspired gaze of the poet: this is the tree and its figure. The desire to build came to him as an extra, a surplus, a concession. Even if it means building, Manal wants to make trees grow in concrete, secretly hoping to make it burst with their roots. He dreams of a porous material that breathes humus and lets sap through as glass lets light through.

Manal Rachdi has seized the contradictions of our contemporaries, of thwarted nomads reclining in their aquariums behind their LCD screens. We are a limited and confined humanity whose paradoxical ecology recommends that we complete our separation from our 'environment': ban zoos, bullfights and circuses with wild animals, sterilise pets, stop eating animal meat… In short, leave animals be (until we realise that plants also suffer from being eaten).

In a world of swings and hinges, sooner or later we reach the tipping point. History will tell whether the turning point of the 2020s and its extraordinary and monstrous climax – the great global lockdown – heralded a return to the swing that would allow human beings to reunite with their true nature, or the dawn of a new age, that of humanity cut off from its roots for good, a 'brave new world' where even reproduction would be assisted and programmed, an urban, locked-down way of life that could well develop elsewhere than on Earth. If humanity can live under a glass dome, it can become the 'multiplanetary species' dreamed of by Elon Musk, populating the most hostile environments, from the Moon to Mars, from Mars to the moons of Jupiter…

It would be the culmination of a process of conquest but also of retreat, the triumph of absolute monasticism by human right. In the 2020s, we can be born, live, work and die without leaving our homes. This was the dream of Pascal, for whom "all the unhappiness of mankind comes from one thing: not knowing how to rest in a room". Except that monasteries had open-air cloisters where you could gaze at the stars, fields to harvest and vines to pick. It's hard to imagine Montaigne thinking without riding through the landscapes of Bordeaux and Normandy, or those of Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Man thought that he would become the master and owner of nature, but it is nature that, in order to protect itself, has cut itself off from humankind, encircling it with ring roads, cowering in its cave from which it can only escape through virtual worlds. Now, humankind lurks in its urban reserves.

But here comes a new generation of architects who haven't waited for a succession of PCs (Party conferences, signatory states) and IPCCs (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to take their destiny into their own hands. Manal Rachdi is the emblem of a generation rebelling in its own way, without a manifesto or fuss, a samurai without a sword, a stealthy and silent warrior, but one who moves.

It's no coincidence that we meet him again that evening at the Centre Pompidou, at the opening of the great exhibition dedicated to Norman Foster, whose great towers and great industrial projects lead to a space dedicated to nature and urbanity, to the figure of the "tree as a metaphor for the ideal building", before plunging back into the great airports and regolithic monasteries housing the extraterrestrial settlers of the Moon and Mars. This is the interesting plasticity of a great architect who adapts to the mood of the times and the contradictory desires of his clients, reserving his utopias for the sketchbooks he inherited from his childhood. As we shall see, Manal Rachdi has not given up on turning dreams into reality.

CHASE OUT NATURE AND IT COMES BACK AT A GALLOP

According to Rudy Ricciotti, "this is the use of signs, the romantic possibility of believing in a transformation of the world, of being ready to fight". Manal Rachdi's work is part of a gentle but stubborn counter-reform, willing to compromise without compromising. Like Jean Nouvel, he does not reject steel and concrete, nor does he succumb to the temptations of Thoreau and Rousseau or the easy gimmick of eco-friendly materials. Nor does he design plywood huts heated with agglomerated marble. No, he tries to synthesise, to graft, to partner, to marry materials, species, circumstances, theories, styles and systems, to study trees, not just to plant a thousand of them, but to deconstruct them and transform them into a Tree of Life (Créteil) or a White Tree (Montpellier). And he is working with everyone: engineers, politicians, industrialists and developers. It's a tree that hides a forest.

Born into a dematerialised, artificial world, Manal Rachdi takes the opposite path, not to return to the state of nature – a utopian and naïve dream of an urbanity unaware of the harshness of wild life – but to return, consciously or unconsciously, to the ideal of the Renaissance, that great century.

It was a time when stones and hedges were hewn, paths and fields were civilised, houses and villages were naturalised. Man had to be the guardian and gardener of God's perfect work. He had a sense of his limitations, a sense of humility; and a sense of aesthetics, so sorely lacking in our utilitarian, calculating age, whose well-oiled assembly lines churn out certified, stamped, calibrated 'hideousness' by the mile.

"Up there in the air, I live in a palace; it's all glass, magnificent and spacious," says the madman in Chrétien de Troyes's Tristan and Isolde. With Rem Khoolas, it becomes a delirious New York, a retrospective manifesto of the vertical New Amsterdam, even if it means housing in its bowels the factories of proletarians wholly devoted to the masters of the sky, according to the vertiginous parable of Metropolis and its many reinterpretations, up to Dark City and The Matrix, which replace Plato's cave and the underground factory with the equally dystopian metaverse and matrix. Manal Rachdi believes in the metaverse, but not in Ready Player One or Total Recall.

Before the 'manifesto' of New York, there was the 'manifesto' of Versailles, made of brilliance, water and light, of palaces, gardens, groves, mazes and Verlaine's "great slender fountains among the marbles". Versailles is the culmination of the humanist, antique and Christian ideal, which tames nature while preserving its naturalness, a reciprocal and subtle interpenetration that puts the lid on the medieval chiaroscuro, while preserving the surprise of other effects – grottoes, hydraulic organs, mirror effects… Through the magic of the Great Gallery's mirrors, the gardens enter the palace and foreshadow the virtual worlds mentioned above. Above all, they foreshadow the vertical galleries of ice that are the forests of crystalline towers in Dubai, Shanghai, Lagos and everywhere else. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the two turning points.

Versailles, a link between ancient cities and garden cities, between the dreams of Eden and Arcadia, Baghdad, Granada and Samarkand; Versailles heralds the nightmares of new cities, the wild modern age, where the urban jungle will replace the forest and concrete will replace marble.

The Marly machine, the levelling of hills and the diversion of rivers, the creation of factories (Gobelins, Saint-Gobain…), all this also foreshadowed the urban follies of communism and capitalism: Louis XIV gave birth to Rockefeller and Stalin. The vertical city, with its forests of concrete and its oceans of car parks, is man without humus, without humanity, with its trail of violence and dystopias leading to Gotham City and Damián Szifrón's Misanthrope, a film in which an outsider 'executes' his fellow human beings with a sniper rifle on New Year's Eve because their noise disturbs the silence of the night, because their fireworks obscure the stars with the surplus of street lamps and concrete towers.

"Beauty lies in the bizarre," wrote Baudelaire, the thinker of modernity. The beauty of the new has been pushed into the realm of the extravagant, La Grande Bellezza is exhausted in the noisy emptiness of fashion shows, pan-concerts and hysterical debates, the exhaustion of resources and meaning, the exhaustion of patience against a backdrop of infrasound…

Everywhere we feel that a turning point is under way, that our era is at a crossroads, and Manal Rachdi's work is part of that crossroads, that vanishing point and question mark. It's impossible to turn back the clock, and the 'great leap forward' to the stars is illusory. We have to repair and transform cities and fields, and sew humans back into the living.

SEWING PEOPLE BACK INTO THE FABRIC OF THE WORLD

Manal Rachdi is the fruit of this great story, and of a family history that began in rural Morocco. Young Manal travelled through the forests of Rabat with his grandfather and will always carry in his body and heart the smell of humus, the sunlight streaming through the branches, the sounds of life teeming and throbbing, the breath of the living. He carries with him the nostalgia of Eden and the garden of childhood.

And what do you think he studied? Architecture? Nope! Manal Rachdi initially studied biology and geology, encouraged by his parents, his father a doctor and his mother a midwife. This unexpected diversion was to prove fruitful: the architect is a midwife of forms, and they operate within the urban fabric. They also know that it is pointless to deny technical progress, and equally dangerous to compartmentalise knowledge. Medicine is still a matter of tinkering and considers the human being as a whole, as a system that is part of a great mystery.

Rachdi's intuitive, sensory and sentimental knowledge of the organic, of living things, was complemented by a scientific approach. He wanted to understand how cells worked. He was fascinated by this marvellous thing that keeps its secret, where life is created behind the protection of a membrane, a porous wall. The cell connects the inside and the outside as much as it separates and distinguishes them, allowing exchange and trade. Blaise Cendrars poetised it in his own way: "Systole, diastole: the two poles of existence; outside-in, inside-out: the two beats of mechanical movement; contraction, dilation: the breathing of the universe, the principle of life: Man. Dan Yack, with his figures."

And then there's the eternal cycle of births and deaths: in his lectures, Manal reminds us that it would only take two or three centuries – a nanosecond on the cosmic clock – to erase all visible traces of human occupation of the Earth. This is another quality inherited from his family history, humility; humility in the face of the complexity of the human body, its frugality, its fragility and resilience, its transience. So it's decided! "Biomimicry is the future of urban planning", and living things will be the main source of inspiration for Manal Rachdi and his studio, OXO Architectes.

So many egotistical architects dream of immortality by designing the unusual monument, the work that stands out, the iconic style that breaks with its time and context. It's the archetypal solitary tower, whether it's an endless tower like the Montparnasse Tower, the Chrysler Building… or a simple one like The Gherkin. When this trend is mentioned, Manal Rachdi reacts immediately: without going as far as anti-matter, he produces "anti-towers" all day long: his contextual architecture blends into the background, stealthily, underground, submerged, almost invisible! His method: "I search the depths of the site for all the information that can help me design a project that is best adapted to the landscape, the weather, the way of life and the traditions. The essential thing is to achieve a balanced dialogue between the architecture, the building itself and its surroundings. And then translate it into balconies with views, gardens or camouflage systems." In this way, he hides the Lycée Jean Moulin under a hill, in a massif, drowning it in a landscape offered in return to the students. From the terraces, they will be able to admire it, with its "gentle curves" and "wide, diaphanous spaces".

Manal Rachdi is an intuitive and iterative landscape designer, rather than a formalist. He is less interested in the typology of forms dear to Jean-Christophe Quinton, who brilliantly boxed up the dreams of the architects of Greater Paris at the Cité de l'architecture, than in the topology of places.

And his method is inductive, intuitive: he puts pen to paper, runs his software, introduces his parameters, his objectives, his constraints, observes the result and rolls the dice again and again until he gets the desired result, like an artist attentive to the smallest detail – a texture, a door knob – and to the overall composition. L'Ecotone Antibes: a hill at dusk, and, beneath the vegetation, a town resembling an anthill, a beehive. The wide staircases of the shared teaching building (BEM) at Saclay become the benches of a "spontaneous amphitheatre", where you can descend or sit down for a relaxed or impassioned conversation – like Hestia and Hermes, always in concert.

Certainly, when Manal Rachdi creates on his own the 'Tree of Life' and the 'White Tree' with Sou Fujimoto and Nicolas Laisné, they are dazzling monuments, towers with a capital T! Look at how the trees climb in terraces along the 'Tree of Life', as if to soften its rigour, creating a layered mass, similar to the rice paddies of the Orient. Look at how the 'White Tree' unfurls its generous balconies in vegetal corollas, in contrast to the austere, phallic or anorexic towers; in contrast to the franchised capitals, "all the same now, facets of the same mirror, dressed in steel, dressed in black, like a lego, but with no memory" (Gérard Manset). It's like a distant echo of the prow and lush service areas of his mentor Jean Nouvel's Nemausus in Nîmes, not far from Montpellier.

In Lille, it's a 'Kaskade' that pours a torrent of greenery over the storeys of a block of white stone with wooded trellises, splashing its luxuriance onto the railway line below, bouncing off the austere, mineral façade of the large 'Perret'-style development in the background. The 'Thousand Trees' suspension bridge over the Paris ring road, Moscow's 'Flowing Park', the rollercoaster of Lille's 'Metropolitan Square' – these are all interpretations of the hanging gardens of Babylon, the inhabited bridges of Florence and Paris, or the troglodytic dwellings on the banks of the Loire, nestling in the stone, between sky and garden.

When Manal Rachdi was asked to design the 'Intelligence Campus' on Creil's 110 air base to open up the world of intelligence to civil society, to bring together in a single place 'paranoid' military personnel, autistic geeks and mad researchers – when any sensible person would run away – he said "yes". He said "yes", and designed a city of the future criss-crossed by drones on sails and wheels, on green motorways, with a village of companies bringing the aeroplane hangars back to life, and then crossroads and amphitheatres where analysts, start-ups and researchers will meet. There will even be a museum of French espionage and a film festival.

Another 'mission impossible' was to resurrect the legendary Victorine film studios, which celebrated their centenary in 2019 but have been derelict for too long. OXO is resurrecting an artistic village, open to all film lovers, while preserving the confidentiality of filming on enlarged sets that will include the dock in which Rex Ingram shot the underwater scenes of Mare Nostrum in 1925, while the magnificent carpentry that was used to make the sets for Children of Paradise and American Night will become a meeting place, restoration centre and memorial to major film shoots, without forgetting to look to the future, with the Ecole des Compagnons de la Victorine. Even when Manal Rachdi is offered the ghostly stations of the Paris Metro, he finds ways to turn them into swimming pools, gardens and theatres.

These projects arouse the enthusiasm of the visionaries; and, as they should, the wrath of the narrow-minded conservatives, entrenched in the comfort of the sterile 'self-sufficiency', hiding behind the cloak of 'defence secrecy' or 'shooting secrecy'… Patience, "patience in the blue" according to Hubert Reeves, in France ideas progress by age.

As with all the greats, Manal Rachdi reiterates the same convictions from project to project, while refusing the ease of self-plagiarism and the 'Signature' menu. He never makes the same building, but not for the sake of it, but because the context demands it. Nature reproduces itself by reinventing itself each time; no two trees in the world are the same. Nature is a never-ending experiment, an entropic fugue in a spiral snake of a thousand mutations.

Yes, Manal is true to Jean, he's doing something new and 'Novel', he's taken up the torch of the man who for decades thundered against "the gigantic enterprise of national standardisation". A sensitive archaeologist of context, Manal continues the fight against the urban planning that "brings the codified, slow and inexorable death of real life to every French city". And like the seventy-six signatories of the March 76 appeal, he works together, in association, as this book vividly illustrates.

THE ZEN HORIZON

It has been said that Manal Rachdi is French and Moroccan, but he is above all Japanese, right down to his samurai physique. He sees buildings as clouds lost in the immensity of a faded sky. In Bordeaux, it's Cirrus with 'celestial verticals' revealing 'distant reliefs', preferring engraving to the stamp. His collaboration with Sou Fujimoto is no accident. The Far East has fascinated him, mirroring the West. In the land of the rising sun, baths are boiling hot, oysters are hot and fish is raw, sake is lukewarm, cars are square and houses are made of paper. People sleep on the floor, furniture flies, a square is closed by a circle and smokers are asked to smoke indoors. We say 'mirror', but a mirror without glass, a paper mirror that prefers translucence and opacity to the hardness of brilliance. Japan helps Manal Rachdi to think backwards, to make light and airy out of hyper-density, as in the housing projects and service facilities designed by OXO for Nanterre.

Manal Rachdi is both Mediterranean and Japanese in his quest for economy of means and resources, and in his search for harmony between forms and uses, in which aesthetics is never absent: Feng Shui and Kalo(k)agathos, the same battle. Optimising, filing, trimming, reversing, sanding, lifting, decompressing, tilting, digging, opening, playing with models and turning them over and over again until the ideal form is found, the perfect equation. All great artists go through this process of trial and error, which requires both intelligence and sensitivity.

One of Manal Rachdi's mantras is that "the greenest building is the one we didn't build". More than half the world's population now lives in cities, and one of the most pressing issues is the 'sustainable city'. Do we need sprawling, breathable cities – pavilion-like archipelagos – or dense, intense, mineral cities? "Neither," replies the apostle of the third way. Densification and verticalisation help to avoid urban sprawl, but mineralisation and the exclusion of living things create other problems: rising temperatures, longer logistical circuits, poor energy efficiency of high-rise buildings, depletion of raw materials, not to mention the effects on physical and mental health. Manal Rachdi is in no doubt: it is the human being cut off from the living who becomes a zombie, a 'vegetable', and ends up obese; it is the violence of the concrete slab that produces human violence. In his tower of crystal and ivory, the old architect of the 'Tree of Life' misses the house of his childhood, just as Manal Rachdi misses the forests of Rabat. A lost paradise, from Genesis to John Milton and Toru Naomura.

Between the sprawling city and the vertical city, there is the path of pre-industrial common sense, the cities of the Renaissance and the garden cities of the industrial age, the wisdom of the Romans and Greeks, who knew how to orient cities according to the prevailing winds, make use of shadows and the circulation of water, and recycle energy and waste. A visit to the ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Peloponnese is more instructive than any engineering textbook. Manal Rachdi is convinced that forests and parks can reduce the temperature of cities by three or four degrees (branches, shade, evaporation, etc.) and that we could calculate and control all the carbon emissions of buildings and cities, if politicians had the will…

Integrate, inspire, recover, recycle. Never give up on aesthetics, on the sudden and unforeseen beauty of life, whose geometry draws the most diverse forms. It was thought that there was advanced life on Mars because of the straight lines on the ground, interpreted as 'Martian canals'. When Manal Rachdi discovered the project for a new city, 'The Line', designed as a gigantic mirror set in the Saudi desert, his heart sank: who would want to live between these gigantic walls, worthy of a set from the Black Mirror series, in a rectilinear city of buildings that looks like anything but a city?

A return to nature has become the new doxy, as demonstrated in 2009 by the responses of the ten international teams that took part in the international consultation on Greater Paris launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Manal Rachdi took part alongside Jean Nouvel, Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Michel Cantal-Dupart. Whether in terms of housing, transport, identity or culture, the need to reconnect with nature was clear: "Never before have we seen a heart so cut off from its limbs" (Richard Rogers). But alas! This great impetus, this great wave, rich in a thousand proposals and "a thousand little joys", was to break against the coalition of bad practices and bad habits: old-fashioned planning, old-fashioned real estate development, old-fashioned engineering, old-fashioned political calculations… The thousand dreams turned into an administrative mille-feuille even more inextricable than the old one, and the metropolitanisation of Fulgence Bienvenuë's metro, designed by the brilliant Jean-Marie Duthilleul, had to give way to a monstrous subterranean wormhole – which, thirteen years later, has still not emerged from the ground.

Manal Rachdi decided to go his own way and experiment on his own scale, without abandoning his wildest dreams, such as establishing communications between the two sides of the Bering Strait. While ecology is the new doxy, while the intention may be there, its application can turn into a nightmare.

Watching Norman Foster and Steve Jobs enclose an entire forest within the giant circle of glass and concrete of Apple Park in Cupertino, you may be impressed by the energy efficiency and formal perfection, but the result is as chilling as The Line. The paradox of maximalist minimalism. Where is the charm of the chance encounter, where is the space left for the unexpected, for improvisation, for discovery? Rudy Ricciotti tells us that he allowed a thick flow of deformed concrete to spoil the beautiful straight lines of a carefully drawn plan (for the Pavillon Noir in Aix-en-Provence) precisely because it was an accident of history, an unexpected scar that occurred one New Year's Eve. Do we want to live in a line or in a circle and spend our days going round in circles?

Cinema is the art of the off-screen, poetry is the art of suggestion, all art is the art of dissimulation, of dissonance. Sometimes half is better than the whole. And for a city to be admired, never shown in its entirety, to be penetrated by small touches and successive events. "A river is only frightening if you don't know how to cross it" (Baltasar Gracián, The Hero). It was in this spirit that OXO designed Dosha, a grand palace with Venetian windows and hanging gardens in the Armagnac district of Bordeaux. "Isn't this the essence of architecture? A place that provokes the desire to explore, that allows each individual to isolate himself in order to continue his reading and his desire to discover?"

Appropriation, the eternal concern of the architect who delivers his building, who asks himself: "Will it become a monument? Will it stand the test of time?" History's fruitful dialogue with geography: how many surveyors' plans have been thwarted or inspired by life's accidents, wars and tidal waves? In Lisbon, the earthquake of 1755 can be read in the austere lines of the Baixa Pombalina, dominated by the winding alleys of the Arabic Alfama and the Roman and medieval Chiado. Paris can be read like the trunk of a severed tree, its growth rings the Gallo-Roman islands, the Place Royale, the boulevard Haussmann and the ring road. In Berlin, graffiti artists have painted over the remains of the great concrete scar, turning the prison wall into a symbol of rediscovered joy. Even the expansion of the austere 'Corbuso-Niemeyerian' Brasilia has ended up as an enormous bagunça, a joyful anarchic mess, which takes us back to the beginning of this story: the labyrinth and its thousand dead ends, the Apple Park clock circle, the swing of progress that takes us back to the starting point.

So let's finish off the enemy lying on the ground, the invisible and insidious ideology lurking in the smooth wall, the wooden language, the cold standard and the hollow word: 'greening', 'HQE', 'eco-neighbourhoods'. Man has cut himself off from his natural and poetic roots to such an extent that he can no longer verbalise or think about what he has lost: symbiotic osmosis with the great cosmic whole. Words fail him and his soul is distraught by this silent loss. Aldous Huxley had to resort to mescaline in order to reopen the gates of perception and reconnect with nature, following the example of the Indian shamans. With the use of hard drugs banned, we cannot expect architects, however talented, to erase thousands of years of progressive detachment from themselves. And yet we must. We have to ask them, because some of them don't know it's impossible. And so they will succeed. One day. Manal Rachdi is one of them.

Éric Garandeau is the author of the novels Tapis rouge (2019) and Galerie des glaces (2021), published by Éditions Albin Michel. www.eric-garandeau.com