Alia Bengana

Alia Bengana (1975, Algeria) is an architect, teacher, independent researcher and author. For the past 15 years, she has been interested in natural materials, with a predilection for raw earth and fibers. Combining architectural practice with the transmission of knowledge, she teaches in Switzerland and France, notably at EPFL Lausanne, HEIA Fribourg and Ecole d’architecture de Paris-Est. Her writing, a blend of research and awareness-raising, calls for a transformation in the way we build. Co-author of Béton, la fin d’une ère? (Éditions heidi.news, 2021), she recently adapted this investigation into a comic strip entitled Béton, enquête en sables mouvants (Presses de la cité, 2024), an educational and entertaining work that questions our dependence on concrete and explores sustainable alternatives.

Her residency project questions the reinvention of architectural gestures in the face of today’s complex construction methods, dominated by industrialized, globalized products. Drawing inspiration from Roman architecture, she revisits fragments of ancient and contemporary European buildings, all of which bear the hallmark of constructive frugality. Through the design of sober details – facades, floors, roofs – she explores an architecture rooted in raw materials and place. Her work will culminate in a handbook and a construction of architectural fragments, revealing the manufacturing process and questioning an aesthetic that integrates time and reparability.