French Touch – Work, personal life, everything in between: how expatriates judge Paris

Our sensory lives have been profoundly transformed by digital technology and smartphones, which have blended our love lives, professional lives, family life, intimate relationships… But these digital interactions produce immense loneliness: what I call the «strength of weak relationships.» What architecture makes possible is the opposite: creating strong relationships: shared stories, rooted places, encounters and face-to-face dialogues. Architecture is a «relational amplifier.» Moreover, two words characterize our era: simultaneity and immediacy. We want to be able to work, eat, love, play sports, exchange, and have fun, sometimes in the same place and almost at the same time. This evolution necessarily transforms buildings to meet contemporary lives.

My research consists of making each building a small urban space, where uses intersect and enrich each other rather than simply juxtapose. This requires accepting the need to leave some space for unassigned areas. Real estate professionals abhor the void, which they consider wasted square meters, when in fact it is precisely these unprogrammed spaces that allow for the most rich uses. Assigned to no particular purpose, they can accommodate different gatherings and activities to be invented.

In Pantin, for Alios Développement, we are designing the project for the Halle des Grandes-Serres, where we are developing 14 different programs around a large 2,500 m² space. This space becomes an area of attraction, breathing life into the surroundings and creating encounters with multiple uses. It is the one that multiplies the creation of value from the asset.

The One Monceau project stems from my fundamental question: in an office building, how can «the company» be created with all the partners, collaborators and interns? The company must be able to express a strong, unique identity in which everyone can identify themselves. In the First Tower in La Défense, EY employees worked three days a week remotely. Upon their return to Paris, we observed a very strong desire to find a collective place to meet. The challenge is therefore to design places where partners and collaborators can gather, exchange and contribute to a common culture.

An office building should not impose fixed usage patterns. It should also leave room for those who inhabit it, with spaces without definitive functions capable of accommodating the unexpected.

At One Monceau, on the ground floor, a long street of 120 m by 12 m with multiple uses connects all the spaces together. These transition spaces, often considered purely utilitarian, become magnified here: symbolically, they connect all the employees together, dressed in a material developed specifically for EY, the «Black Light», inspired by the artist Pierre Soulages.

I prefer the «French savoir-faire» or the «French talent» to French Touch.

At the Hôtel de la Marine, on Place de la Concorde, which I restored, the salons used to open once a month under Louis XVI to showcase the furniture commissioned by the king and queen. All of Europe came to discover the innovative craftsmanship and French aesthetic of the 18th century.^e century.

What is beauty today? It’s no longer an aesthetic standard. For me, it’s the quality of the encounter found in this digital world: through a phrase, a landscape, a painting, an architecture, with another human being. This encounter brings us back to life, to question.

As an architect, the first meeting is the place where one builds: understanding what happened there, taking history into action and extending it, relying on this context as the basis for creativity. It is to think that one does not live in the functional or the structural, but in the imaginary and the symbolic. Therefore, the human principle is the first principle. It is opposing the hold of modernism in architecture that has become nothing more than an outdated formal language. The «French talent» is therefore to invent narrative architecture. It is to invent a unique place through narration.

The beauty of architecture therefore does not lie solely in its form or aesthetics. It stems from the quality of the encounters it enables between users, the connections it creates between them. It is also the only way to ensure that architecture belongs to everyone. These places of encounter and dialogue are possible thanks to freedom. Without freedom of speech, without freedom to be oneself, there is no true encounter or dialogue.

In my agency, many of my employees come from abroad, and many have chosen to come and work in France because of this freedom of speech, this freedom of expression that they did not find elsewhere. This freedom is precious.