A lecture by Rafaël Ménard, architect and engineer

For millennia, and until the last two centuries, humanity lived in a kind of "steady-state energy regime": a world essentially governed by flows, without depleting fossil resources, whether energetic or material. Available resources determined the forms of architecture and urban planning.

Since the industrial revolution, thanks to the fire of fossil fuels, architecture has been able to allow itself anything, according to an inverted logic: the project dictates the "shopping list" of materials and forms — the energy logistics will follow. Result: human habitat now weighs on the world with an unbearable burden.

How can we move away from this world bloated by unsustainable consumption? How can we break the infernal cycle of extract/produce/destroy? Can we even still build? Yes – but on the condition of changing everything, of breaking away from the orbit into which we have soared.

These will be the open questions debated during this lecture by Raphaël Ménard, engineer (Ecole Polytechnique and Ponts & Chaussées) and architect (Ensa Paris-Belleville). His work examines how energy, material, and climatic limits transform design, from object design to territorial planning. His thesis Énergie, matière, architecture (2018) gathers about twenty years of research and projects, confronting theoretical hypotheses with the conditions of their implementation.

A guiding thread of his practice and teaching (Ensa Paris-Est and EPFL) is to explore forms and uses compatible with resource sobriety and the phase-out of fossil fuels. This reflection is developed in the exhibition Énergies légères at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris (2023-2024), and then in Vers la légèreté, Petite histoire énergétique des sociétés humaines, published by Wildproject (2025).

Since 2018, Raphaël Ménard has headed AREP, a multidisciplinary agency bringing together more than 1,000 employees in France and around the world, which designs train stations and public spaces.