The identity of a building: its map, its registry, its memory

Every building carries an identity. It is not a style, nor a signature, nor a silhouette. It is the sum of what precedes it, what constitutes it, and what it will become. It can be read, documented, transmitted.

Before the project, there is the map.

Before the first line is drawn, the place speaks. Through its climate, its soil, its light, its history, its uses. Our work begins there, in this patient reading. Prevailing winds, path of the sun, distant views, geology, materials available nearby, the daily gestures of inhabitants, the built memory of the neighborhood—all this constitutes the original map of the future building. A map that cannot be read in plan, but in strata: geological, climatic, social, symbolic, economic.

From this reading emerges an architecture that does not impose itself. It adjusts, it dialogues, it extends the place rather than interrupting it. The building becomes a legible sign within its territory—recognizable because it belongs there, singular because it reveals a new reading of it.

During the life of the building, there is the register.

A building is not a delivered object. It is an organism that lives fifty, one hundred, two hundred years. It will be transformed, extended, divided, repurposed, perhaps demolished. Each of these operations has a cost—carbon, matter, energy, memory—which today is neither measured, nor traced, nor transmitted in any coherent way.

Attempts exist, and this must be acknowledged. In France, the Housing Information Booklet, inscribed in the Climate and Resilience law of 2021 and in force since January 2023, has laid a first milestone—but it remains focused solely on the energy performance of housing, kept by the private owner, and absent from commercial buildings. At the European level, the Digital Building Logbook is the subject of a standardization request in 2026, with a harmonized standard expected for 2028. These measures are moving in the right direction. They are not enough.

We advocate for a step beyond: a building register—unique, public, legally binding, covering all buildings and their entire lifespan. Linked to BIM, it records the initial carbon footprint and that of each subsequent transformation, the materials used and their origin, their potential for reuse, successive uses, technical choices, the interventions of architects, engineers, craftspeople and operators who follow one another.

This register must be held by the State, not by the owner. Delivered mandatorily upon completion of each construction, it is amended with each subsequent intervention, under the responsibility of successive project owners. It is made legible and accessible through a national carbon cadastre—the ecological equivalent of the land registry—which displays, building by building, parcel by parcel, the actual carbon burden of a territory's built heritage.

Only under this condition will the sector's low-carbon commitment cease to be a promise and become data. Without legally binding traceability, without public record-keeping, without a cadastre, each generation of architects starts from scratch on buildings it does not understand, and each renovation is decided without ever knowing whether it costs the planet more or less than what it replaces.

And after?

Just architecture is no longer that which imposes itself, nor even that which inscribes itself in its site. It is that which accepts being tracked, measured, transformed, and one day transmitted. The map establishes the project. The register extends it, under public guardianship. Together, they make each building a documented being—capable of enduring, mutating, and remaining intelligible to those who will come after us.

It is this continuity—between the reading of the place, the trace of the work, and transmission to the long term—that defines a building's identity for us. And it is this that must become the foundation of all our choices.

Manal Rachdi, OXO Architectes