Manifesto

My name is Benjamin Liatoud.
I did not learn architecture by standing still.
I learned it by moving.

Travel forged my eye long before any method or system did. Cities, climates, textures, light, ways of inhabiting space — each place left a trace. Paris taught me rigor and proportion. Miami revealed light as a material in itself. Los Angeles showed me scale and freedom. Tel Aviv, restraint and tension. Rio, sensuality and rawness. Madrid and Athens, time layered into matter. Moving between these places shaped not only my work, but my way of seeing.

I graduated from the École d’Architecture de Lyon in 2003, but my education never stopped there. Architecture, for me, is not a closed discipline. It is a continuous observation of how people live, how materials age, how cultures express permanence and desire. What interests me is not the image of architecture, but its weight, its texture, its presence over time.

Art Deco has always been a quiet obsession. Not as a style to replicate, but as a language to understand. Its geometry, its elegance, its confidence. The way it balances ornament and structure, sensuality and discipline. Art Deco assumes that beauty and rigor are not opposites — they are allies. This belief runs through everything I design.

I have an instinctive attraction to raw, honest materials. Stone, wood, metal — materials that carry memory, resistance, imperfections. I care deeply about where they come from and how they are transformed. I go to marble quarries. I walk through workshops. I touch samples. I look for density, grain, sound, weight. Sourcing is not a task; it is part of the design itself.

I work on the ground. Always.
I build relationships with artisans, craftsmen, cabinetmakers, metalworkers, upholsterers, stonecutters. People who know their material better than any catalogue ever could. My network is not abstract — it is made of hands, tools, conversations, trust built over time. This human chain is essential to the precision and soul of each project.

I also curate. I search, I hunt, I wait. Vintage furniture, forgotten pieces, objects with a past. I am not interested in accumulation, but in resonance. A chair, a table, a lamp carries a history, a proportion, a silence. Integrating these pieces into new spaces creates tension — between eras, between uses, between memory and projection. That tension is alive. It matters.

I do not believe in trends. I believe in coherence.
I do not believe in spectacle. I believe in intention.

Architecture, to me, is not about imposing a signature, but about composing a dialogue — between place and culture, between material and gesture, between movement and permanence.

My work is nomadic by nature, but never rootless.
Each project belongs to its context, yet speaks a common language.
A language shaped by travel, by art, by matter, by craft.

This is not a style.
It is a way of looking.
And once the eye is formed, it never stops moving.