Summer Issue 2025

Maisons du Maroc dedicates an article to my work in its summer issue, around the theme “the awakening of matter.” This publication does not summarize a career. It examines a specific approach to design: the one that connects the intuitive, the rooted, and the universal.

The exchange with the editorial team focused on the relationship between craft, design and the search for meaning. Not as separate themes, but as dimensions of the same discipline. Design does not decorate craft. It does not “modernize” it. It reveals what is already operating in the worked material.

What Is “The Awakening of Matter”

“The awakening of matter” is not a poetic formula. It is a description of a specific state: the moment when material stops being a passive support and becomes an agent of form.

Most industrial design treats material as a neutral support. A mental form is projected and imposed onto the material through technical processes (molding, machining, laser cutting). The material resists or yields. It has no voice in the design decision.

The approach I practice is different. It starts with the material. It observes what the material can do, what it naturally tends toward, what it resists. The form then emerges from this dialogue — not imposed from the outside, but negotiated through a process of attention and response.

The Intuitive, the Rooted, the Universal

These three terms appeared naturally in the conversation with Maisons du Maroc. They describe three registers of a single design practice.

The intuitive is the capacity to sense before analyzing — to recognize in a material, a form, a spatial relationship, something that functions without yet being able to say why. This intuition is not mysterious. It is accumulated experience, pattern recognition developed through years of practice.

The rooted is the relationship to specific territory: Moroccan materials, local craft know-how, a relationship to light and space structured by a particular climate and culture. This rootedness is not limitation. It is a source of precision.

The universal is the capacity to translate what is rooted into forms and objects that speak to contexts other than their origin. An object that carries Moroccan craft knowledge, designed according to principles that transcend the local — this object can be understood and desired in Tokyo, Milan or New York.

Featured in Maisons du Maroc, Summer 2025 issue, theme: “the awakening of matter.”