Signature · Architecture · Paris
Maison Edouard François
The Paris practice that made vegetation a building material, not decoration — buildings that sprout, flower towers and façades that scatter seeds.
Who it is
Maison Edouard François is the architecture, urbanism and design practice of French architect Édouard François, based in Paris — in the Bastille neighbourhood, where he moved in 2016. The current name dates from 2012, when François reorganised the agency and renamed it; the gesture is at once a reference to French “maisons” and a joke about his own aristocratic origins, which he is happy to recount. The firm brings together an international team of around thirty architects and develops projects conceived from the geographic, economic, social, historical and environmental context of each site.
François is one of the central figures of vegetal architecture in France. His work is iconoclastic by method: instead of applying a garden onto a finished façade, he makes the plant an element of the building system itself — gabion walls that germinate, structural planters, seeds carried by the wind. L’Immeuble qui pousse (“the building that grows”), in Montpellier, and the Tower Flower, in Paris, are the pieces that established his reputation; the Tour M6B2 de la Biodiversité, delivered in Paris in 2016, takes the idea to its limit by letting the wind disseminate wild seeds from the top, to regenerate the flora of the Paris region.
The firm moves between social housing, luxury hospitality and heritage: La Closeraie (Louviers, 2006), Coming Out (Grenoble), the Eden Bio complex, on Rue des Vignoles, in Paris, with housing and artists’ studios, the Hôtel Fouquet’s Barrière, on the corner of the Champs-Élysées and Avenue George V, and the intervention at the Samaritaine, the former Henri Sauvage department store on the Seine.
In Brazil, Maison Edouard François’s signature appears in partnership with Triptyque on O Parque Brooklin, in Brooklin.
Language
- Style: vegetal and contextual architecture — each building is born from a reading of its site, and vegetation enters as a system, not as a finish. The result is deliberately singular, at times provocative.
- Materials and brand: structural pots and planters, gabions and substrates that germinate, metal support meshes for climbing plants, timber and masonry in dialogue with the historic surroundings.
- Awards: Eden Bio shortlisted for the Prix de l’Équerre d’Argent and the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009; Coming Out, Prix Habitat Durable 2008.
Landmark works
- L’Immeuble qui pousse, Montpellier.
- Tower Flower, Paris.
- Tour M6B2 de la Biodiversité, Paris — 2016.
- Eden Bio, Rue des Vignoles, Paris.
- La Closeraie, Louviers — 2006.
- Hôtel Fouquet’s Barrière, Paris.
- La Samaritaine / Cheval Blanc, Paris.
- O Parque Brooklin, in Brooklin, São Paulo — with Triptyque.
Signatures in the portfolio
No development in the collection carries this signature yet — it is here for the weight of the name in São Paulo's high end.
