Architecture & Virtuality
TEXTES 2026
ARCHITECTURE
I never build from a definitive plan. I prefer to let an architecture emerge gradually, much like a painting that reveals its own path as it is being created. I rarely know what the whole will look like when I place the first elements. It is the forms, the volumes, and the ideas that appear along the way that determine what comes next.
In my virtual constructions, I often work on several areas simultaneously. I may begin with the foundations, then move to the top of a tower, return to a platform, imagine a new building, and later resume work on a space that has remained untouched for several days. Each part feeds the others. I do not progress in a linear fashion; I move forward through successive intuitions.
When I do not yet have the time to fully develop an idea, I simply materialize it. I place a block, a door, a volume, a walkway, or a structural element that will serve as a marker. These elements become three-dimensional notes. They allow me to recover an intention later without having to draw or write it down. In this way, my architecture preserves the memory of my ideas.
Technical constraints do not interest me as obstacles but as challenges. I enjoy discovering how different materials can interact, how limitations can be diverted, or how a new way of building can emerge from them. Very often, a constraint becomes the starting point for a solution that I would never have imagined otherwise.
I am not simply trying to construct a functional base. I seek to create a place that evolves with me, that retains the traces of my discoveries and my hesitations. Every addition transforms the whole, opens new possibilities, and calls for further construction.
My way of building in the virtual world is deeply connected to my way of painting. In both cases, I trust the creative process. I do not want to impose an idea upon the work; I prefer to enter into dialogue with it until it discovers its own form. For me, building is not the execution of a project that has already been conceived. It is a way of thinking through construction.
It is also worth noting that the three-dimensional virtual world offers the remarkable possibility of entering an architectural space while it is being built and constructing it from within.
At the National School of Fine Arts, there was a discussion about artificial intelligence and its influence on the media, an influence that had already been observed since the 1980s and 1990s. One journalist remarked that people were becoming less and less interested in current affairs. Instead, everyone now chooses to focus only on what personally interests them. He considered this worrying because, in the past, current events provided a common reference point, and almost everyone had a position regarding the major issues of the day. Today, however, what matters most are individual differences, while the collective seems to have become less important.
My own view is quite different. I find it very positive that people devote themselves to what genuinely interests them. If someone has no desire to follow literature or the news, they have every right not to. Instead, they can become interested in their own literature and their own current events: their everyday life. That is the key word—everyday life. I shape my daily life according to my desires and my moods.
The same is true in architecture.
I would also like to mention something that happens while I work architecturally. On the one hand, there is within me a strong inner force that naturally leads me toward orthogonality, toward orthonormal structures similar to Cartesian coordinate systems. Yet, on the other hand, I constantly feel the desire to tear that orthogonality apart, to escape that Cartesian framework and move beyond it.
Within the creative process, I would not say that I am either inside it or outside it. Rather, I am a witness to a creative process that I guide only to a certain extent—perhaps less than I imagine. I suggest possible continuations, but at a certain moment I notice that my attention shifts from structure to colour. A module adopts the colour of its surrounding environment, yet in this particular case the chosen colour is red, creating a visual echo with the red already present at the top of the platform. It functions almost like a landmark, a visual marker.
Yvan Moallic - YMO 2026