At 28, most architects start their career “in an agency”. Meriem Chabani was designing a cultural center for Burmese people. It was in 2017. The project was defined through a series of co-construction workshops and the building, a beautiful edifice made of bricks, wood and bamboo, split on its diagonal by a large exterior staircase, was delivered in 2022. A year earlier, the construction site was at a standstill and one of its sponsors was in prison for protesting against the military coup. There was no guarantee that the work would ever be finished. The young architect consoled herself with a photo which showed the bare structure, colonized by pro-democracy demonstrators. The steps had become a public space. It was their primary vocation, the one demanded by the inhabitants of the village.
Small size, big style, devastating humor, this 35-year-old Franco-Algerian welcomes us in a small office open on the roofs of Paris which she shares with the editorial staff of the Funambulistan architecture magazine with a decolonial tendency. She is pregnant with her first child. Her two grandmothers, whose memory she evokes in the installation she created for the recent Venice Biennale, were illiterate.
You have 83.53% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
