Une conférence de Rafaël Ménard, architecte et ingénieur

Can we still build without depleting resources? Engineer and architect Raphaël Ménard invites us to rethink our way of building to imagine a more restrained, lighter architecture better suited to our planet's limits. A reflection to change our perspective.

For millennia, and up until the last two centuries, humanity lived in a sort of "steady energy regime": a world essentially governed by natural flows, without drawing upon fossil resources, whether energetic or material.

Available resources determined the forms of architecture and urban planning.

Since the Industrial Revolution, thanks to the fire of fossil fuels, architecture has allowed itself anything, following an inverted logic: the project dictates the "shopping list" of materials and forms — energy management will follow.

The result: human housing now weighs unbearably heavily upon the world. How can we escape this world bloated by unsustainable consumption? How can we break the infernal cycle of extract/produce/destroy? Can we even still build?

Yes – on condition that we change everything, that we detach ourselves from the orbit into which we have soared.

These are the open questions up for debate during this lecture by Raphaël Ménard, engineer (École Polytechnique and Ponts & Chaussées) and architect (Ensa Paris-Belleville).

His work examines how energy, material and climatic limits are transforming design, from object design to territorial planning.

His thesis Énergie, matière, architecture (2018) brings together some twenty years of research and projects, confronting theoretical hypotheses with the conditions of their implementation.

A guiding thread of his practice and teaching (Ensa Paris-Est and EPFL) consists of exploring forms and uses compatible with resource sobriety and the phase-out of fossil fuels.

This reflection is developed in the exhibition Énergies légères at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris (2023-2024), and subsequently in Vers la légèreté, Petite histoire énergétique des sociétés humaines, published by Wildproject (2025).

Since 2018, Raphaël Ménard has headed AREP, a multidisciplinary agency