In 2023, architect f.Roche_S/he and philosopher Emanuele Coccia initiated a speculative dialogue that has extended beyond architectural investigation and subverted any established design and ecological approaches. Their typologically uncharacterizable collaborative works, The Chamber of the Past-Future (2023) and [n]Permanencies Tractatus (2025), along with their continuous discussions, are acts of sabotage within the intersection of architecture and other disciplines. They are constantly setting evolving boundaries among the relationships between human, nonhuman, and nonliving systems which are activated through mutating trajectories. f.Roche_S/he’s long-lasting understanding of the relationships between the intangible and the material and Coccia’s studies on the bond between nature, architecture, and humanity, as well as their comprehension of reality as constant metamorphoses, set the ever-changing non-rules of their joint work.
Valerio Franzone (VF): There are many overlaps and differences in your respective work. What is your approach?
Emanuele Coccia (EC): François and his work are legendary to me, but I never met her, him. Then a common friend suggested that we work together on a competition. When we met, it was evident that we shared a lot. It’s interesting to work with François because he’s a genius and has played an essential role in the architectural debate of the last few decades. Our conversations provoke me to question my ideas. We sometimes disagree and tell each other that what the other just said is bullshit. That’s why I need our intellectual dialogue.
f.Roche_S/he (R-S): Emanuele’s intentional confusion—“I never met her”—and Gender Troubles belongs to New-Territories, a fugitive, native immigrant strategy. I am not supposed to be in Paris. After our studio crashed in 2011—the Lehman Brothers’ butterfly effect—we started to develop an art museum in Bangkok. I moved there with computers, robots, cats, and my trans partner to face a bottom-up situation—[which became] the original impulse behind New-Territories.
However, teaching around the world can dull any activist ambitions: the risk of the platinum lounge! The Rotary club membership and PhD footnotes weren’t the future I imagined. I preferred a bleeding-heart manifesto from the street, shaped risk, a mythomaniaS — fitting with your radical pathos.
From mythomaniaS, a Cassandra symptom before the virus, we sensed collapse: of the here-and-now, of social glue, and the rise of arrogant academia perpetuating privilege. We lived in this interzone, where the architect is a weaver of relations — with humans, non-humans, and activism as a grotesque routine. But even psychotic stories end, and the pandemic brought us back.
Then I met Emanuele. And in 2023 we created The Chamber of the Past-Future in Paris.
We built a stage for dispute: political deviance and dark humor in the shadow of extinction. In the work, three digital characters in a 1960s concrete grotto, 40 meters below La Défense, form a court judging humanity. Visitors are on trial. It’s a heterotopia, a theater of shadows where CCTV and the forbidden are deterritorialized and “conspiratorialized.”
Together, we defined a “nowhere location” as a disputed stage for confronting our existential mistake: humans in survival mode—maybe evolution’s misstep. The worm was already in the fruit.
EC: Our approach remains speculative rather than purely constructive, as our questions extend beyond the strictly architectural. The problem today is how to overcome the poststructuralist approach, and that’s why we comprehended that what is at stake is not just an architectural issue but broadly cultural and precisely philosophical. I want to emphasize it because neither project has a specific site or client request. So we could have a take that was broader than being purely architectural or constructive.
R-S: Ecology is a relational mode between living species. Yet I’ve always included non-Cartesian, mystical, and metaphysical approaches—emotional, sensorial failures—to reframe knowledge and power relations and to rethink the tension between fiction and nonfiction via synesthesia and apparatuses.
EC: The debate is no longer focused on determining the truth or solving enigmas; it serves only to affirm the moral superiority of one of the two sides. And each side implies that the other is inadequate. We should stop identifying every idea with a form of moral judgment on reality. Of course, there are moral assumptions and consequences of ideas and positions, but debate is the lifeblood of knowledge.
VF: Similarly, politics now revolves around moral issues. Consequently, it is living in a crisis.
R-S: During the first Chicago Biennale in 2015, Camille Lacadée and I performed at a community center usually used by homeless people. For five days, it turned into a hotspot for the left-wing elite, who displaced those in need. People waited outside with trolleys, lacking authorization badges, while the congregation of political correctness and armchair ecology, dressed in Prada, indulged in moral catharsis.
These are the same voices promoting inclusiveness and gender-friendliness from cultural studies—my background. In the U.S., French theory became a bourgeois niche of PhDs, where social justice translated into a new Rotary Club. I was the only one protesting.
VF: François, since the digital architecture era, you have been among the few moving digital research into the built dimension, and you did it through simple technological stratagems. Slowly, you left architectural practice as we commonly understand it and the materiality of built projects and moved to the immaterial, abandoning physicality. What shaped your path as an oscillation between the intangible and the material?
R-S: The 1984 exhibition Les Immateriaux at the Centre Pompidou by Jean-François Lyotard has long sparked debate on the digital and emotional, the material and immaterial—yet it was misread by artists and architects as glorifying technology. Lyotard lamented this fetishization, linking it to the neglect of his Marxist years with Socialism or Barbarism. Early on, he saw the threat of Roosevelt’s “military techno-structure,” which would later morph with Palo Alto’s Silicon Valley into the weaponized digital libertarian structure.
As for me, I stand between discovery and alienation, indifferent to boomer approval. Cyberpunk, voiced by Bruce Sterling, is a dark Cassandra. Douglas Coupland’s Girl in a Coma captures our ambivalence: alive and dead, like Schrödinger’s cat, in limbo.
EC: François understood that it makes no sense to reject technology or progress, but it is better to control and subvert it. It is akin to Negri’s sabotage: modernity is not inherently evil; it needs to be reshaped from within rather than being opposed. Instead of proposing parametric architecture, as was typical, he revolutionized architecture by twisting technology. However, he was almost the only one adopting this approach. Many architects, informed by ecological thinking, adopted a naive and romantic approach toward technology, rejecting it entirely, which proved disastrous, as architecture is inherently technological. It cannot be an invitation to come back to nature, because there is no such thing as nature.
R-S: I was a friend of Antonio Negri, influenced by Italian operaismo—entrism, workerism. The tactic: infiltrate and inoculate from within. At Fiat in Turin, this exposed the weak point in distribution. In Genoa, a handful of frozen workers’ cars paralyzed the city. Accelerationist activism. The question: Where is the weak point in the just-in-time flow?
In architecture, it lies in the phantasm of control. For decades, I have inoculated synesthesia—an intentional disruption of perception and cognition, resisting MIT’s classificatory logic, heir to the Enlightenment. This overlapping synesthesia lets us navigate cracks between biology, biopolitics, digital craft, dirty robotics, ecosophy, nostalgia, and amnesia—sidestepping the trap of master-planning sadism or Bauhaus totemic ideology.
VF: At the time, architectural design involved digital simulations—data. Instead, your work explored how unpredictability and uncontrollability intersect in the project through the oscillating relationships between living and non-living realities and bodies. Dusty Relief’s growth was not designed through a digital model; instead, it was a continuous and uncontrolled mutation of the built building, an evolution driven by the organic and inorganic matter and the weather in Bangkok. That’s a big leap forward.
R-S: When I was teaching at the Bartlett in 1999, I met Cedric Price—he was already wary of parameters. Who decides to qualify, overvalue, or dismiss them? He was the first to challenge this deus ex machina, the architect extracting parameters as a substitute for the multitude described by Negri. Yet the multitude holds self-organizing potential. Slums often protect humans better than any over-designed condo—except the few criminal ones, used without ideological hypocrisy.
VF: Emanuele, through your work on natural and human worlds, you participate in the architectural discourse. In a moment when the built environment is participating in many societal and environmental imbalances, what is the role of philosophy in assisting architecture in giving radical and operative answers?
EC: Philosophy is not a discipline, but an attitude that can emerge in other disciplines. Plato proved that literature is a form of philosophy, Aristotle that biology is a form of philosophy, Marx did the same with economics, and so on.
The relationship between architecture and philosophy is much older and closer than we think. And it is not a superficial relationship of assistance: true architecture has always been a form of philosophy. Alberti, for example, was an architect and a philosopher. In the 1960s through the 1980s, architects such as Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, and Rem Koolhaas wrote works on the city that have the same philosophical importance as the classics of the discipline.
On the contrary, ecology has proven to be less interested in real debates and has become very dogmatic. It is a science that refuses to look back at its history to realize that many concepts it considers evident are not only not evident at all, but are politically dangerous, uninteresting, and part of the problem, rather than of the solution. Ecology is one of the most responsible actors in the moralization we were discussing. Latour, in his final years, said that the original sin of ecology is to think that everything is clear and that we must act. In reality, everything still needs to be understood and learned: the climate crisis is evidence of the fact that we need a new cartography, new categories to name the most obvious experiences. After all, we don’t even have a suitable name for the planet (Earth, Gaia, these names are clearly insufficient). Ecology refuses to admit that there is still much to be understood. It lies in a naive and frozen attitude, such as simply banning chemicals and GMOs. Instead, we should question what we call nature. From this perspective, what François and I did was also perceived by many as anti-ecological, because we dared to question these very dogmatic assumptions of the current ecological debate.
VF: What you and Latour said is the answer that I’m expecting, because it changes our understanding of ecology.
EC: There is a very anti-speculative and anti-philosophical attitude in the debate today, and not just in architecture. There is a part of the left that is convinced that they already know everything and are living in the truth. And the arrogance that follows this illusory and almost Gnostic belief—that of believing that you live in truth and that the rest of humanity must simply recognize your moral and cognitive superiority—has caused serious damage. It is precisely what is happening in the U.S. The Democrats, in a way, didn’t realize that the defeat was not just electoral but also ideological. We must understand that we need to study everything again; then philosophy can be of help.
VF: Sometimes, specialization can drive us to lose sight of the bigger picture. Instead, philosophy can provide a comprehensive understanding. Looking at the whole changes one’s approach.
EC: Absolutely.
R-S: I mainly need philosophy to destabilize me. As Paul Preciado notes, the “order of discourse” is shaped by the white gaze and masculine pornographic utopia—architecture, our last libertarian discipline, preserves this dubious order through conservatism and fear of lost authority. I’m drawn instead to Guattari’s ecosophy, which treats not only the Edenic ideal but the real, the social contract, and subjectivities that resist categorization or control.
In Chicago, people plan a Scream Day on the lake shore—which I see as an act of despair that is metabolized into sheltering. Two months ago, I was screaming quietly at the Venice Biennale. I found a 25-year replica: Water Bar 2000 reborn as Coffee Bar 2025. What was radical—machines purifying the lagoon—has become a corporate spectacle, even a Gold Lion. A schizophrenia persists between the technologies we promote and what we consume: a snapshot of our present dysphoria, architect’s belly versus mind. The Gold Lion shows the Overton window at work: the avant-garde of yesterday turned into today’s department-store commodity.
VF: This leads us to reflect on architecture and its various forms of practice. Considering that interdisciplinarity now might look like a fact, to understand the limits, potentialities, and role of architecture, we cannot reduce it to professional practice alone. We must acknowledge that architecture is equally informed by its other forms of practice, including curatorial, editorial, pedagogical, activist, performative, and emerging ones. Is interdisciplinarity a given in design? Or is it a cover-up for old approaches?
R-S: In 2012, I edited Log 25, on resistance and resilience. I invited mathematicians like François Jouve and philosophers like Antonio Negri and Paul Preciado. The issue was not a multidisciplinary showcase but a cluster of principles of resistance—against “good taste” as distinction and academia as status quo. Few architects or artists joined; if repeated, I might exclude the discipline altogether. History moves in cycles: after WWII, survivors like Emmerich questioned the master’s words; in the 1990s–2000s, computation unsettled corporate spoliation. Now we return to a Beaux Arts “Groundhog Day,” where architects dress their UBU thrones in Harvard footnotes. By nature, we expose the contradictions of society, mixing manifestos and countermanifestos, synapses and guts, where disobedience and activism embrace both honey and cyanide.
Architecture is moods—bad moods, procrastination, vulnerability—in sync with a planet we have abused. It is not expertise or MIT categorization, but finding cracks in fortresses of certainty, even eco-moralism as bourgeois hygeinism. With neurobiologists like Jean-Didier Vincent, I researched Architecture of the Mood, funded by Harvard, focusing on reptilian biochemistry and glandular secretions. Here, dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, and cortisol replaced programming, making the psyche an ecological vector of resistance. Misunderstandings became part of design.
VF: You both have an interest in how different living and nonliving bodies intertwine. Metamorphosis is a permanent character shaped by multiple factors, not a temporary status. Consider our bodies’ aging process and microbiomes: We are hybrid actors, not following binary logic. Still, we often don’t accept such a narrative, but we believe we are firmly determined and unique.
R-S: Your question already filled the answer. Trans is trespassing on substances and identities, an alchemy transmutation.
EC: Architecture is an attempt to shape everyday life. Going back to your previous question, Valerio, it must be multidisciplinary and encompass the entire range of purposes and communities, as there is no unique structure that suits everybody. Architecture is the science, practice, and technology of communities. Today, in comparison to the 1960s and 1970s, there is a considerable misunderstanding about the meaning of multidisciplinarity, as many scientific fields are often overlooked. As François illustrated through operaismo, it makes no sense to refuse a form of knowledge. It’s better to subvert it to change its form and application. Every discipline or model can be transformed into something that brings liberation. Architecture has a highly malicious attitude toward knowledge and toward time, because the question of metamorphosis is a question about the relationship between architecture and time.
VF: And about the relationships between living and nonliving bodies.
EC: There is a widespread tendency today to imagine that the most radical form of architectural sustainability is that of ephemeral buildings that are destroyed over time. Yet there is nothing more anti-ecological. Architecture that integrates transformation and metamorphosis is architecture that looks not to tomorrow but to the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow is what can be drawn from today. It is the form that derives from the calculation that identifies the forces that give life to the present. But radical architecture does not look to tomorrow but to what happens after tomorrow, the time that is not yet visible nor a simple logical and material consequence of the present. This is why it is also necessary to get rid of the idea of repair. It is a way of taking the future hostage, preventing the day after tomorrow from arriving and inoculating, grafting something unexpected. And it is a refusal to accept that change is a natural part of life and that organisms change to produce more life. This is exactly the attitude needed to be open to metamorphosis. Architecture should invent new lives for broken objects, not repair them, because things inevitably break, including the planet.
R-S: In a slum, nothing is permanent, nothing lost—a metempsychosis of matter and souls. We are instruments of passage, not of cultural ideology. Nothing is patrimonial; everything is negotiable.
Impermanency haunts my own devices, most now ruins or cankers in a Ruskinian dream—no white cathedral for me. The Japanese car park cracked in a Niigata earthquake; a hurricane tore the Hybrid Muscle (2003) in Chiang Mai, reshaped with locals in corrugated steel—these are far from patrimonial conservatism, unlike Paris’s cathedral hypocrisy.
I aimed to make shelters as gardens—bauen in German: to cultivate and construct. A garden is a transformation, fragile, vulnerable, alive. Impermanency itself becomes a pataphysics approach.
VF: Your most recent collaboration is [n]Permanencies Tractatus, which is on view at the Biennale Architettura in Venice. Is it a critique or a manifesto?
R-S: Neither manifesto nor critique. It just says: Move along, nothing to see. It’s a stage—like theater props—where incoherence is allowed, recalling the 19th-century Incoherent Arts of Alphonse Allais. These bioincoherences set a scene for dispute, a polyphony of three voices.
Everything is prepared for transmutation and migration; organic matter is never spoiled. It is erasable and dissolvable in the lagoon. The Impermanence’s Tractatus will feed the Venetian catfish and return to the food chain.
EC: This installation was more radical and coherent than the majority of the installations in the Arsenale. One of the problems of this Biennale, which was one of the weakest I have attended, is that in most projects, the architects limited themselves to working with materials. They didn’t address that architecture is more than just reflecting on materials and sustainability. Instead, they must imagine different forms of life, not only human. François and I represented the life of someone, not just the materials of a future building. The primary purpose of architecture is to host lives and imagine communities.
VF: It makes me think about how we still design architecture through repetition of models as typologies, technologies, and materials. This continuous repetition permitted the affirmation of modernity through its economic power but also demonstrated its failure as it excluded relative places, times, and any form of individual, societal, and environmental specificity. Starting from [n]Permanencies Tractatus, what counter-typological approaches do you envision to address different specificities to tackle the climate crisis?
R-S: I was born in European postmodernism, when radical architects were exiled and their books nearly banned. The US, with Venturi and Scott Brown—ambiguity of architecture, Learning from Las Vegas—opened doors to subculture and non-conformist thought. They alone approached Lyotard’s philosophical postmodernism, rather than regressive archetypes. Ecology now demands the same: a “protocol of distance” in Claude Levi-Strauss’s sense.
The computer r-Evolution promised autogenerative systems—Cybersin, AutoPoesis, Allende with Maturana and Valeria. Yet I prefer a porous, non-lock system, closer to Steiner’s anthroposophy, open to symbiopoiesis. In the digital era, design arises from forces, vectors, multiple inputs—not blob parameters—yielding morphogenetic artifacts, scripted in recursive loops, sensors reading our decaying environment and psyche. This morphogenetic process, mixing additive, subtractive, and forming forces, breaks with typologies, statics, petrified edges—suspect and lazy remnants.
EC: There is a misunderstanding in the last 30 to 40 years of architectural debate that lies in the interpretation that reduces modernism rather than considering it within a broader movement. For example, Uzbekistan’s modernism merged modernist ideas, Soviet social architecture, and Islamic culture. It’s different from how modernism has been widely perceived. The same can be said for Brazilian or Moroccan modernism. Modernism was the explosion of numerous dialects worldwide.
VF: Still, it was globalized through a common language, even if it had dialects.
EC: The common is essential. We must stop thinking that the search for common knowledge or language is negative. We face a common thread today, the ecological crisis, and we have also acknowledged that cultural division is not beneficial. I’m saying something against the new trend in anthropology. We must stop considering cultures as substances that can be divided, just as geography divides biomes or politics divides populations. Culture can diversify itself, but not by following national or ethnic divisions. It is common, and it becomes different every time; architecture remains the same. It’s not a problem if there is a shared basis for everybody, because we are one single humanity, and we face similar problems everywhere. Of course, we don’t have to impose one single form on everybody. This is the problem of typology. However, modernism was not just this colonial enterprise, as Venturi reflected on the fact that a modern city can host various architectural styles. Let’s try to be more faithful to our past.
The typology discussion nowadays is looking at history in the wrong way. Typology is interesting for examining the historical development of buildings and for how shape can be transformed and hijacked.
VF: What is your next step?
R-S: There’s a temptation to share the Oblomov symptom—Bartleby, Perec’s L’homme qui dort, Musil’s Man Without Qualities: avoiding the Western, imperialist, productivist machine scripted in our predator DNA genome. Not operaismo activism, but social distancing, like Japanese hikikomori. Criticizing a system only serves to reinforce its performative cynicism.
Perhaps these will be the last words of this exchange: an enterprise of “auto-critique”—in French, or “masochist self-criticism.”
An edited version of this exchange appears in the October/November 2025 print issue of The Architect’s Newspaper.
Emanuele Coccia is associate professor at the EHESS in Paris and has written extensively on ecology, architecture, and fashion. His last published book in English is Philosophy of the Home (Penguin 2024).
f.Roche_S/he are fugitive French-born doppelgängers-architects whose work explores the intersection of architecture, biology, and philosophy, often questioning the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, developing a pathology, a biocyberpunk.
Valerio Franzone is an architect. The director of OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes, he has done work that spans design and research projects, teaching, and publications on how architecture tackles the current societal and environmental urgencies.