Do less with less, an architecture of parsemony

This discussion explores the relevance of an architecture of frugality. Against the backdrop of dwindling resources, it examines a design practice grounded in attention to the existing built environment and the search for the right intervention, in order to avoid any superfluous additions.

The existing conditions serve as the starting point: built fragments, obsolete structures, unfinished buildings, and materials resulting from successive uses. Not as a legacy to be managed, but as environments that are already active, to be interpreted before any transformation takes place.

These spaces define unstable situations where the project no longer begins with a tabula rasa, but with a dense and constrained “already-there.” The aim is to open a discussion on what shapes the architectural gesture: the ways of interpreting the existing context, the thresholds for intervention, and the trade-offs between transformation and preservation. How can we intervene without excess? How can we inhabit a space without overwhelming it?

How can we recognize the moment when the intervention becomes too much? Through these exchanges, a shared focus on the remnants of the world as project material begins to emerge. Not an aesthetic of minimalism, but a practice of moderation, where architecture occupies the space between understanding and transformation, and is conceived as an art of adjustment rather than of production.