Paris— Jacques Ferrier Architecture and Sensual City Studio have merged operations to form the rebranded Ferrier Marchetti Studio (FMS). The value-added firm is a laboratory of creativity and foresight where human senses, emerging technologies and sustainability rise to the forefront of all aspects of architectural master planning. FMS embraces architecture as a radical agent of change and reinvention, fostering new interactions between building and user and between materials and the environment.
“Beyond the design of aesthetically-pleasing objects, our architecture is about leveraging opportunities to create positive and meaningful relationships between buildings and the people that occupy them,” explained Pauline Marchetti, founding partner. “It’s all about contributing to a more holistic, sustainable and sensual world in which to live.”
With offices in Paris, Shanghai and Lisbon, FMS is staffed by a multicultural team of 60 architects with various competencies, all of whom share a humanistic vision of urban life. FMS approaches each new project as a unique story, where collaboration within the firm’s network of art, architecture, urban planning and social science professionals precedes all other forms of planning or technical documentation. Based on deep analysis of user experiences, shifting trends in large modern cities and shared journeys of distinctive discovery, the firm endeavors to predict their effect on architecture and vice versa.
Guiding principles
FMS’s approach to architecture resides upon a framework of eight pillars of design:
- Resonance focuses on meaningful relationships between people, spaces and places.
- Synergy with climate espouses architecture that embraces ambient climactic conditions rather than denying them.
- Useful aesthetics focuses on a project’s value as a measure of impact and purpose rather than of its luxurious materials.
- Senses and pleasures places human experience at the heart of all new projects.
- Details that matter celebrate the detailed craftsmanship of the micro as well as the macro.
- Built landscapes infuse biodiversity and create ecosystems linking cities with nature.
- Mobility and balance explore the design of mobility infrastructures envisioning fresh modes of travel.
- Meaningful contexts ensure that FMS designs provide relevant, efficient, purposeful and long term social/civic meaning.
FMS is exhibiting at the Centre de Design de l’UQAM in Montreal, Canada (seen above)—marking the firm’s first international exhibition since its global rebranding. It will consolidate the work of its founding partners, associates and collaborators under the umbrella of a single, unified vision. FMS founding partners, Marchetti and Jacques Ferrier, will present Entre-deux, Une Architecture de la Résonance, highlighting the firm’s humanistic approach to urban infrastructures.
