prioritising resourcefulness over form

"We are living in a crucial moment where we are rethinking the old ways of producing materials and using resources”, says Carlo Grispello, co-founder of Graal Architecture. Founded in 2011 with Nadine Lebeau, the French architecture firm focuses on minimising the amount of material used while centring each project's relationship in its surroundings and the needs of neighbouring residents. Grispello cites the pandemic, the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine as world events that have refocused attention on how things are manufactured. For Graal, this means prioritising resourcefulness over form.
This is so central to Graal's design decisions that even seemingly decorative elements have a thrifty functionality. The pinkish-grey concrete waves that make up the facade of Graal's leisure centre in Athis-Mons, completed in 2019, serve to balance the load of the building while using the least material possible. The distinctive roof of their university cafeteria in Cergy-Pontoise, from 2021, sticks out like a visor, using less material than if it were held up by columns. Instead, thick wooden beams hidden on the inside of the building hold the roof at the angle of a half-opened envelope.
"We are focusing our interest on the production rather than the sum of the building,” says Carlo Grispello, co-founder of Graal Architecture. ln their 2021 university cafeteria in Cergy-Pontoise, this means retaining the integrity of an existing building and adding to it with an economy of means. Its distinctive 'visor' (opening spread) is held up by internal beams rather than columns (left), opening up the interior (below) to the surroundings and flooding it with natural light.
The cafeteria is an extension stacked on top of a low, rectangular building featuring strips of tall windows. “We wanted the extension to have a relationship with the building underneath and the surrounding park”, Grispello explains. The nature around the building is brought inside the space through floor-to-ceiling glass windows that make the extension glow with the colour of the leaves outside.
Part of Graal's design process involves making bas-reliefs - raised collages which lie somewhere between a drawing and a model. “A diagram is too superficial,” Grispello says. “Thinking about how we can provoke sensation through material helps us make decisions throughout the process.” Boards of bas-reliefs with concrete and wood jutting out of their surfaces decorate Graal's offices, offering a range of materials at the architects' fingertips.
Graal's bas-reliefs were used to envision how light would travel across a block of social housing units in Paris, which is situated on a slender piece of land between an old railway station and a pedestrian street. The honey-coloured development is matt like a paper parcel, and the top of the building resembles three steps on a staircase, lowering the roofline to avoid blotting out the sun. “It's important to make sure our buildings don't negatively impact the existing residents” quality of life,' says Grispello. “New buildings are a negotiation with the people who already live in the neighbourhood.”