Ophélie Dozat

Ophélie Dozat (France, 1993) is an architect, teacher and researcher. A 2018 graduate of ENSA Versailles and the EHESS, she is pursuing a doctorate in architecture at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles (ENSA-V) and the University of Cergy-Pontoise with a research project that questions the aesthetic role of the retaining wall in landscape construction.

Trained at 2A+PA (Rome), DOGMA (Brussels), ECOLE and N. Simon Architectes (Paris), she co-founded her architecture agency Materra-Matang in Paris in 2022. Her practice develops around an acute analysis of inhabited and natural environments with the strong intention of connecting architecture to its soil. A lecturer at ENSA-V, she also collaborates on research projects on territorial and urban planning, which have been the subject of exhibitions at the Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage (2019), and indeed at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal with the project Scénarios Futurs, winner of the FAIREPARIS competition (2020).

Her project for the French Academy in Rome, entitled Substruction, proposes a re-reading of the support structures of Rome, considering them as aesthetic objects of the urban space, support structures of narratives and collective interactions. Through a survey of the city’s palimpsest-like walls and the production of metaphorical objects inspired by them, her project aims to appropriate these walls that surround us in an attempt to qualify them and reinscribe them in the field of aesthetics. From the structural arts to the work of art, the support goes beyond its initial technical function, as a tangible element that opens up new habitable potential in the urban space.

→ Her website 

Photo portrait © Daniele Molajoli
Video portait © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis