”Finding the essence of the matter” is what Karine Herman and Jérôme Sigwalt, who co-founded the K ARCHITECTURES agency in 2000, desire most. By ”essence of the matter”, the architects are not referring to a way of life or even the materials they use. lt is not so much asceticism which fascinates them, but rather depth or the very fact of the materials they use. They reler to pragmatic, sometimes industrial or military, architecture, often semi- vernacular, ”where nothing nead be removed or added to be struck by the power of the work“. The K ARCHITECTURES associates are thus on a quest for unvarnished emotion. As such, materials are at the heart of their work. While they are wary of bias towards certain materials, Karine Herman and Jérôme Sigwalt nevertheless have a soft spot for those which provide a medium for working with mass and which defy the passage of lime. ”We believe that an edifice must be meaningful throughout the centuries, including when it has been reduced to ruins.”

”Never satisfied”, Karine Herman and Jérôme Sigwalt know that the ”es- sence” they speak of is found through experience, ”You don’t learn how to be an architect, you become one through your work,” she argues. ”The talents
of an author are not enough to produce meaningful work. lt is also necessary to overcome the complexities of a discipline laden with

ever more constraints and make an argument for taste,” he adds. The efforts required to do so have never weakened their resolve to continue down this path they have elected. For as long as she can remember, Karine Herman has associated happiness with the ”pleasure of being in a space.“ And there was only one profession to put her inspiration into practice. As for Jérôme Sigwalt, his grandfather and great-grandfather, both architects, were no strangers to the appeal that the ”first of the major arts” has to him.
So when they met at the ENSA in Montpellier during their studies, they were hardly dilettantes. They decided, with their contemporaries, to set up a group, the K, just as some set up rock bands. At the start, the letter was part of an old sign on a train carriage they discovered while scoping out a railway wasteland between the docks, the city, ponds and the sea in Sète. ln that era of heady ideals, the group found its name and its logo in this K.
”There is a story about a relationship with a space, a site, on area linked to every project. As a general rule, our architecture evolves from stories we hear, or invent in the space. Once they have been completed, we hope these spaces provide food for everyone’s imagination.
Throughout 2001, the agency’s work was displayed in the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. ln 2002, K ARCHITECTURES led the “Dune Museum“ team in the final phase of the international competition for designing the future Grand Egyptian Museum. ln 2004, Karine Herman won the AJAP (Albums des Jeunes Architectes et Paysagistes - Young Architect and landscape Designer Albums) and part of the agency’s work was exhibited ot the Palais de la Porte Dorée. Since 2005, the K ARCHITECTURES associates and their team have taken on a vast range of projects of different sizes and types: housing, public cultural buildings (theatres, multimedia libraries), educational institutions (colleges, schools), in urban, rural or heritage sites.
While activities so far have been based exclusively in France, the K ARCHITECTURES associates are intent on exporting these principles sooner or later. For the lime being, they are not tiring of the diversity of national settings. They will always choose a heterogeneous site to an eco-neighbourhood designed from scratch based on socio-economic imperatives. Harmony matters little to them if the context is eloquent.

Budgets are intrinsically connected to results. Because they know how to stay within prescribed limits, Karine Herman and Jérôme Sigwalt sometimes arrive at radical projects.
ln short, the thread running through K ARCHITECTURES’s work should not be sought in dogmatic writings, less still in on architectural trend. Here, the depth of lines is a question of stratified stories. Never gratuitous, shape arises from a quest for meaning or, quite simply, the naked outline of function. Or when architecture is frank, while waiting to find its essence. lt is a moving start.