Richard Scoffier

Let us return to the ground, considering it as the essential element of architecture. We approach it here through two exercises given to first-year students. The first took place in June 2020 on the beach at Deauville, in collaboration with the association Archisable, and asked students to mark out a territory on the shore momentarily freed by the tide. The second took place this semester in a studio at the ENSAVPS, where students built large white cardboard models and used complex structures to raise or suspend layered floors so as to qualify them spatially without resorting to any partitioning at all. Here, the floors photographed by Michel Denancé are striated, patterned, or freely punctuated with emergences.

There, the models show them solidly anchored to their context by posts or pillars, suspended in the void by cables from gantries, or held within powerful exoskeletons.

They are flat to allow for a multiplicity of uses, or they tilt to demand a bodily engagement in order to be conquered.

(Original text of 2023, machine translated in 2026.)