Considering the Site

Before being walls, a building is a response to a site. The ancients called this genius loci, the spirit of the place, the plain fact that a plot of land is never a blank page, but an environment already full of forces that must be read. The path of the sun decides the openings, the prevailing winds dictate the protections, the slope of the land suggests the levels, the nature of the soil calls for one foundation rather than another. A century-old tree, an outcropping rock, the passage of water after the rain, so many facts that precede the project and that, taken seriously, already draw half of it.

Context is not only natural, it is also built and lived in. The alignment of the street, the height of the neighbours, the rhythm of the facades, local materials, molasse sandstone and tile in Geneva, brick and blue stone in Brussels, form a conversation begun long before us. To this are added less visible things, the views one frames or protects, the noises one shelters from, the neighbourhood's daily routes, the memory of the plot and of those who occupied it. To set a building in place is to take a stance in this conversation. Too loud, it silences the others, too timid, it brings nothing.

Considering the site is therefore not a prior constraint, it is the raw material of the project. A rightly placed building seems to have always been there. It catches the right light at the right hours, it shelters where the site is exposed, it opens where the landscape gives. We begin every project with this long time of listening, walking the ground, observing the shadows across the seasons, understanding where one comes from and toward what one looks. What the site asks for always weighs more, in our choices, than what fashion proposes. It is on this condition that architecture can endure without going out of style, since it answers not only to its era, but to its place.