Le Point — The Architect of Biodiversity

By Nathalie Lamoureux

It was a dream. That of living one day in a forest with a library and a few towers. Then he discovered that it could be realized. Passionate since childhood by drawing and immersive walks in the forest, he found in architecture the means to create dialogue between buildings and their environment. All his projects integrate large expanses of nature: terraces, interior forests, vegetated walls.

For this architect, tomorrow's city will be natural. "Beautiful drawings of nature are the foundations of an intelligent life and a city of tomorrow, a city capable of transforming itself permanently and of transforming itself. Biomimicry is the future of urbanism. When we have succeeded in creating a city as efficient as nature, we will get along very well."

A man of a certain gentleness, Manal Rachdi, 38, embodies this young generation of architects who dares to disrupt the established order, by combining judicious analysis, playful experimentation, social responsibility and humor. A man who makes the physical world attached to the earth and the dematerialized universe of the Internet reflect on each other mutually.

Manal Rachdi grew up in Morocco, in a family of landowners. "Nature is not merely an aesthetic landscape that one enjoys contemplating in the frame of a window, forests and rivers. It is a form of interiority to man that the habitable space is surrounded by a cultivable space. A world made up of all its pieces arranged to resonate with one another. His farmer grandfather guided him. "He told me: nature gives back what you give it, you work it, you cultivate it, you care for it, you tend it and in return it is responsible. It helps you in the earth and he added: look at that, it's earth that makes things grow. Today, I know anyway polluted ones that don't make noise, thanks to absorbing asphalt; when cars drive, you don't hear them, you can lie down next to them. In France, the electric car is very democratized. In ten years, when the project will have started, mentalities and uses will have changed, because the entire ring road will have changed as well."

Geology. His schooling is a straitjacket from which he can hardly escape. "At school, I waited for it to pass!" His parents imagine him as a pharmacist. He pursues studies in biology and geology that prove enriching. "That allowed me to understand the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large, and the functioning of cells and photosynthesis. Being grounded is important, I often tell my team that if we remove something and it continues to function, it means it served no purpose. Architecture must make sense. We are not artists. Nothing is arbitrary. Beauty does not interest me. What makes sense interests me, because things that make sense last longer than those that only have the property of being beautiful."

Graduated from the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Nantes in 2004, Manal Rachdi trained at the English Duncan Lewis, based in Bordeaux and focused on ecological architecture, then at the Du Besset-Lyon agency, famous for the Maison de la Villette (1987) and the building of the newspaper Le Monde, in Paris (1990), before joining the Ateliers Jean Nouvel in 2007. With them, he participates in the design or construction of social housing in Valencia, Spain, the library in Clermont-Ferrand, the Seoul Opera and the MoMa brand tower in New York. Eager to spread his own wings, he founded the OXO agency in 2006, with Tanguy Vermet, then, in 2009, his own firm, Manal Rachdi Oxo architectes, in order to develop architecture systems that transform urban practices.

If Manal Rachdi is part of a connected generation for whom the democratization of travel and technological advances allow one to be everywhere at once, "it is out of the question to cut himself off from his roots." From his first architectural projects, it is a project that led him to rethink Saclay-la-Ville, to design the Tree of Life in Créteil – a setting where his family, at the end of its life, could enjoy the species that he himself and his team imagined recreating.

"If trees gave wi-fi, we would plant more of them. It's a shame, trees only give oxygen."

— Manal Rachdi