The commission
From fieldwork to site
The studio works on housing, public buildings, retail and refurbishment, providing full architectural services: fieldwork, design, planning application, tender documents and site supervision.
Studio
I never begin with a brief.
Three bedrooms, a living room, an open kitchen: people often hand me the list before they tell me how they live. I put it aside. I start with the people.
I talk with those who will live, work or care for others in the place. I watch how they receive guests, where they sit, what they avoid, what makes them feel at home. The brief comes afterwards: it is their way of living, translated.
There is no single truth in architecture. A clinic in Morocco is not a clinic in France: a birth brings the whole family together, guests are received, people stay for hours, and the corridor becomes a sitting room. Whoever has not seen it draws a plan that is right on paper and wrong in life.
A place has its own rules too: a step that separates, a shadow that gathers. They are written nowhere, and everyone keeps them. I do not correct a place's flaws; I make them the project.
Soukaina Filali, architect
The method
From word to drawing
Every project starts somewhere different. The order never changes.
- 1
Listen
Conversations, never a questionnaire. I want to know how people live before I know what they want. Whenever I can, I spend a day where they live now.
- 2
Pin up
Photographs of the place and the people in it go up on the wall. I move them and group them by what connects them, never by use. In the end a word emerges.
- 3
Write
I write about that word. The text looks for what it could become in space, without translating it literally. A few words, crossed, give the concept.
- 4
Draw
Drawing begins once the concept is written.
Background
Lalla Soukaina Filali Ansary
Licensed architect (DESA, HMONP), graduate of the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, awarded best diploma. She practised in France with architecture studios and construction groups on housing, healthcare, office and competition projects, where she ran workshops with medical staff and patients to understand their daily lives before drawing. She then founded her studio in Mohammedia, Morocco.