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JUNG Talk · October 2 · 24 min

BUILDING CAN WAIT

JUNG in conversation with Jean-Baptiste Friot What does it actually mean to design a new building today? For Jean-Baptiste Friot, the answer begins with a contradiction. When reading about his EUmies Award project, one sentence immediately stands out:"Building can wait." For him, constructing a new building is no longer the default solution. Quite the opposite: before building something new, we should first ask whether an existing building could be reused, transformed or adapted. And yet, together with Betillon & Freyermuth, his office Crypto Architectes designed Le Foirail in Laguiole – a new public building bringing together a music school, a media library, childcare facilities and community services. An open timber structure designed to evolve, expand and, in theory, even be completely dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. A building conceived not for a single moment in time, but for change itself. For this project, the team was selected as an Emerging Finalist for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2026. But Jean-Baptiste is less interested in the finished building than in the conditions under which architecture is created. In today's episode of the JUNG Talk Podcast, Dijane Slavic and Natalie Geraud speak with him about architecture without folklore, about the honesty of building, about a profession in transition – and about why sometimes the most important architectural decision is not to build at all.

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JUNG in conversation with Jean-Baptiste Friot
What does it actually mean to design a new building today? For Jean-Baptiste Friot, the answer begins with a contradiction. When reading about his EUmies Award project, one sentence immediately stands out:"Building can wait."
For him, constructing a new building is no longer the default solution. Quite the opposite: before building something new, we should first ask whether an existing building could be reused, transformed or adapted.
And yet, together with Betillon & Freyermuth, his office Crypto Architectes designed Le Foirail in Laguiole – a new public building bringing together a music school, a media library, childcare facilities and community services. An open timber structure designed to evolve, expand and, in theory, even be completely dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. A building conceived not for a single moment in time, but for change itself. For this project, the team was selected as an Emerging Finalist for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2026.
But Jean-Baptiste is less interested in the finished building than in the conditions under which architecture is created. In today's episode of the JUNG Talk Podcast, Dijane Slavic and Natalie Geraud speak with him about architecture without folklore, about the honesty of building, about a profession in transition – and about why sometimes the most important architectural decision is not to build at all.

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