BUILDING CAN WAIT

JUNG Talk vor 2 Wochen

JUNG in conversation with Jean-Baptiste Friot

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24:24

What does it actually mean to design a new building today? For
Jean-Baptiste Friot, the answer begins with a contradiction. When
reading about his EUmies Award project, one sentence immediately
stands out:"Building can wait." For him, constructing a new
building is no longer the default solution. Quite the opposite:
before building something new, we should first ask whether an
existing building could be reused, transformed or adapted. And yet,
together with Betillon & Freyermuth, his office Crypto
Architectes designed Le Foirail in Laguiole – a new public building
bringing together a music school, a media library, childcare
facilities and community services. An open timber structure
designed to evolve, expand and, in theory, even be completely
dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. A building conceived not for a
single moment in time, but for change itself. For this project, the
team was selected as an Emerging Finalist for the European Union
Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2026.
But Jean-Baptiste is less interested in the finished building than
in the conditions under which architecture is created. In today's
episode of the JUNG Talk Podcast, Dijane Slavic and Natalie Geraud
speak with him about architecture without folklore, about the
honesty of building, about a profession in transition – and about
why sometimes the most important architectural decision is not to
build at all.