HEMAA is an architecture and urban planning agency born from the meeting between Charles Hesters and Pierre Martin-Saint-Etienne. The production of the agency covers all scales of architecture and regional planning, both urban and rural. The plurality of programs addressed (public facilities, collective and individual housing, cultural venues), allows us to maintain a transversal and decompartmentalized vision which enriches and renews our reflection with each project. The answers that we bring are built collectively around a reflection for a sustainable architecture respectful of its location. We consider that the act of building must be generous and bring as much as it receives from its immediate and broader context. We advocate an architecture rooted in the history and geography of the place. Understanding its essence makes it possible to define the location, morphology, layouts, and to build with the materials best suited to each program and each location.

Each situation makes it possible to re-examine the scale and the impact of the constructions on their environment to define the right dimension of the built volumes; fragment the mass and qualify the voids. The school group in Normandy is thus an opportunity to build in wood and local slate using traditional morphologies. The school in Sartrouville is made of solid load-bearing stone, the childhood center in Evry creates a village of adobe and wooden pavilions in the heart of a park, and the house in Garches is made up partly of millstone resulting from the deconstruction of the existing one. This research on the insertion in a site, the use of biosourced or reused materials and local resources constitute for us the foundations of an environmental design. We chase away any superfluous material to return to an architecture composed of its essential elements. Through the prism of this passive design, we also ensure that each project tends towards energy and carbon sobriety throughout its life cycle. We believe that Nature and Architecture are not mutually exclusive. It is on the contrary a fair balance which must be found with each project, so that these places, these landscapes, find after our passage, a new harmony.