The difficulty faced today by architects—and more broadly by all those who wish to take part in shaping their living environment—lies in a generalized dependence on industrial, standardized, and extractivist modes of production. This grip hinders the collective capacity to imagine other ways of building, to reactivate ancestral or vernacular knowledge, to construct differently, with what is already there. Refusing industrial processes is not a nostalgic retreat; it is a lucid stance in light of the socio-ecological conditions upon which the dignity of the inhabited world depends.

This observation is alarmingly relevant: we produce too much, we waste relentlessly, and architecture often participates in this logic of saturation. As long as a model of architecture based on new construction, demolition of the existing, and waste production dominates practice, the built environment will remain an instrument of accumulation and speculation, to the detriment of subsistence, territory, and the living world. The construction sector today accounts for nearly 40% of global CO2 emissions. It is also responsible for the massive extraction of raw materials, transformed into uniform materials without face or history. Architecture distances itself from the very places it transforms. It builds by consuming what is depleting and accumulates what does not disappear.

In this context, it becomes urgent to reconsider what it means to build and to inhabit.

This research project takes root in a specific territory: Blanc-Sablon, in the Basse-Côte-Nord Territory. An isolated village where materials, food, and even dwellings arrive from outside. Architecture here is imported, standardized, indifferent to the lines of the ground, to the winds, and to the stories. It erases instead of listening. Confronted with this dependence, the project explores the possibility of an alternative material, drawn from local and plant-based resources: a concrete made from nettle—an abundant, invasive plant—mixed with lime. The goal is to experiment with its structural and insulating properties in order to design a building element adapted to the local climate. Beyond technical innovation, this research seeks to redefine the conditions of an architecture of subsistence: an architecture that draws on immediate resources, engages simple gestures, and offers a response to ecological urgency. It envisions architecture as an act of minimal transformation rather than massive production.

So how can we conceive of an architectural practice that is neither extractive nor spectacular?

How can we formulate an aesthetic of rootedness, capable of working with the dynamics of the ephemeral and the local?

Perhaps this is where the contemporary challenge of the discipline lies : not in building more, but in building differently.