Manal Rachdi: «The greenest building is the one that isn't built»

This week, the Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architecture, was awarded to Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto, 78 years old. An opportunity to give a nod here to the younger generation by meeting a forty-something architect, Parisian, Moroccan, with a Japanese-like appearance and an already well-filled career. A lover of nature and passionate about travel, Manal Rachdi, founder of the OXO agency, is also the ideal person to talk to about climate change. Fascinated by the cenotes of Mexico, these gigantic natural wells where lush vegetation grows, he is inhabited by the walks of his childhood in the forests near Rabat. The day when he realizes his dream? "When I succeed in reproducing an ecosystem, a building, a hotel that will be self-sufficient and able to evolve," explains the architect who has just designed buildings without air conditioning in Marseille, a new 15,000 m² incubator near Jussieu, whose façade will reflect Notre-Dame and is one of three architects of the new Polytechnique school in Palaiseau.

SIGNATURE Carole Papazian

TEXT Ten years ago, what were you doing? Do you remember a striking experience? Something you saw, heard, or shared that stayed imprinted on your retina or in your ear? I have one! I was jumping on a train. Heading to Montpellier to discover a project, still a sketch at that time, of a 21st century folly in Montpellier.

A tower 56 meters high, nicely named L'Arbre blanc, positioned between the city center and the neighborhoods of Port-Marianne and Odysseum. A building whose balconies evoked the petals of a flower, a project imagined by a trio made up of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and two young architects Nicolas Laisné and Manal Rachdi. "Since then, the residents have taken ownership of L'Arbre blanc beyond what we had imagined. We had planned two planters on the balconies, but they grew plants everywhere, it looks like a vertical forest," explains with delight ten years later Manal Rachdi in a café near Beaubourg.

To bring nature into the city, yes but how? How does an architect create? What do you learn from a failure? How do we adapt our real estate to climate change? Manal Rachdi gave me a meeting at Café Beaubourg where he is a regular, on the occasion of the publication of his first monograph, a beautiful art book published by Skira that traces his career and convictions. A book in which he discusses his philosophy when approaching a project: "I seek all the information that can help me design the project most adapted to the landscape, to the meteorology, to living habits, to traditions." An opportunity to take stock of what drives him forward, but also how he approaches climate change and how buildings must adapt.

https://www.lopinion.fr/o2-week-end/un-starchitecte-a-reims

I must confess, I don't always understand architects. Some, locked in an ivory tower (!), are in an almost ethereal world that is inaccessible to me. Manal Rachdi is not one of them, he accepts down-to-earth questions, doesn't dodge them, even if behind his intense dark eyes and his samurai-like appearance, you can feel a flame...

Let's go for a rapid-fire session!

-You first studied biology and geology before architecture? Useful or a waste of time?

-Manal Rachdi: my parents are a doctor and a midwife, they imagined me as a dentist or pharmacist. At 16, after my baccalaureate, they enrolled me in a double degree program in biology and geology in Morocco. This allowed me to learn about the infinitely large and the infinitely small, plate tectonics. Then I turned to architecture at the school of la Cambre in Brussels, then Nantes, but what I learned during those first years is useful to me today, I am passionate about art, about nature, about science.

-Why did you create your OXO agency in 2014?

-With OXO, I wanted to create sensitive architecture, inspired by nature. I try to recapture the sensations of freedom we have in nature. It's an experimental approach, one of trying to reproduce part of the ecosystems that exist in nature.

-This nature that inspires you, where is it found?

-Whenever I can, I go into the forest, to the mountains, to Normandy or further. To different places. The idea of recurrence worries me, I want to explore new places. Things are not to be looked at on a screen or on glossy paper, they are to be visited. The imagination is born from lived experience, from experiences.

-Your next trip?

-I want to go to Brazil, to Rio and Brasilia to see how the architectural successes of the past have evolved. I am fascinated by the way people appropriate architecture. In my projects, I try to leave as much freedom as possible so that users can make the spaces their own. What the residents of L'Arbre blanc in Montpellier did with the building went beyond what we had imagined initially.

https://www.lopinion.fr/economie/ce-couple-qui-depense-des-millions-de-dollars-pour-sauver-les-joyaux-architecturaux-de-la-californie

-Your project, with Sou Fujimoto, to build Mille Arbres, buildings and an urban forest spanning Porte Maillot in Paris, will ultimately not see the light of day. Did you go too far?

-When a project doesn't come to fruition, it's disappointing. It makes you sad. We had presented CO² absorption solutions going beyond our work as architects. The ecological associations that attacked the project and the judges based themselves on the data that exists today without projecting ten years ahead when the ring road will have evolved. There will be more electric cars, pollution will no longer be the same. This project may have come too early. You have to arrive with the right project at the right time.

https://www.lopinion.fr/economie/la-foret-est-elle-lor-vert-de-demain

-A failure, a project that doesn't come off, what does that teach you?

-When you're a young architect, you have an absolute belief in the need to innovate. For good ideas to be realized, to be accepted, I learned to channel, to structure my vision.

-Is energy renovation always as virtuous as we believe? Putting polystyrene insulation on a building's façade by scattering small beads into the surrounding nature, does that really make sense?

-When we let waste go into nature, we destroy the future. That's true for polystyrene beads as for everything else. Society must accept that all these small actions deteriorate the environment. We see the phenomenon as much in construction as in fast fashion. By using polystyrene rather than bio-based materials to save 10 to 15% during insulation work, a condominium does not protect buildings long-term… Renovating buildings makes sense. The observation is correct, but the answer is wrong. We must adapt the way we renovate, the solutions to the place, to the climate in which we find ourselves, and also to the housing. Today, in France, we do the same thing everywhere. Sometimes, insulation is not the right answer, the right answer would be to change the heating method. There needs to be awareness from all actors in the chain and training.

https://www.lopinion.fr/economie/absurde-renovation-energetique-20-000-euros-de-travaux-pour-rien

-Can we do without air conditioning? How did you manage in Marseille in the housing that Nexity is delivering on the former MGEN headquarters?

-We can do without air conditioning. You just need to look at constructions in hot countries with a patio that cools things down, it's common sense. We will also have to learn to live in a more frugal way, by opening windows less when it's hot. In Marseille, we designed the Art'Chipel project around a central patio in each building. It allows air to circulate. There are no corridors, apartments in duplex, metal fins that protect the façade from the sun and shared terraces.

https://www.lopinion.fr/o2-week-end/des-pepites-archi-ecolos

-Your new Parisian project where Notre-Dame will be reflected. Where will it be?

-It is located next to the Institut du Monde Arabe and Jussieu. It's the Sorbonne University Innovation City, a project of over 15,000 m² that will be delivered in 2025 and will link the city to the campus. There will be a café, a bookstore, conference rooms on the ground floor, offices, the largest public incubator above. The façade tilts by 5 degrees and will allow Notre-Dame to reflect like with a periscope.

-Your ideal project?

-To create a project that functions autonomously, with its own energy, its transformation, water recycling, waste that is anaerobically digested, a project that can evolve in its uses. I am obsessed with the idea of creating an ecosystem that needs nothing to function. Technical solutions exist, but technique must not take over architecture. It's the human, sensitivity, beauty that are most important.