Architecture often reveals itself through what is visible: walls, roofs, facades, materials, and form. Yet for Selma and Salwa Mikoü, architecture begins elsewhere. It starts with what lies beneath the surface of a place—the memories embedded in a landscape, the traces of forgotten infrastructures, the stories carried by materials, and the cultural narratives that continue to shape how people inhabit space. Through their Paris-based practice, Mikoü Architecture, the Franco-Moroccan twin sisters have developed an approach that treats architecture not simply as the production of buildings, but as a process of uncovering and translating these hidden layers into spatial experiences.
Born in Fez and working between Morocco and France, the architects have built a practice distinguished by its ability to move between disciplines, scales, and histories. Their projects emerge through an intensive process of research, drawing, model-making, sculptural experimentation, material studies, and construction. Whether designing housing, cultural facilities, wellness centres, or urban developments, they approach architecture as a living dialogue between landscape, memory, craftsmanship, and contemporary modes of building. Their work is guided by what they call an “Atlas of Resonance”—a methodology for reading territories through their geology, cultural histories, local knowledge, and invisible structures.
At the heart of Mikoü Architecture is the belief that construction itself can become a form of storytelling. The studio describes itself as a “manufacture of architecture,” where prefabrication and industrial systems coexist with craft traditions, and where assembly becomes both a constructive and cultural act. Rather than imposing architecture onto a site, Selma and Salwa seek to reveal what already exists there, creating spaces that encourage encounter, collective experience, and a deeper connection between people and place.
Over the years, this distinctive approach has earned the practice international recognition through competitions, exhibitions, publications, and teaching appointments, including at the Architectural Association in London. Yet despite its growing visibility, Mikoü Architecture remains rooted in a simple but ambitious question: how can architecture create meaningful relationships between memory and contemporary life? In this conversation with Africans Column, Selma and Salwa Mikoü discuss their shared journey from Fez to Paris, their concept of the Atlas of Resonance, the role of material and craftsmanship in their work, and why architecture must remain open to transformation.
Africans Column: You founded Mikoü Architecture between Paris and Fez, working across different cultural and urban contexts. How has your shared background—and your dialogue as co-founders—shaped the way you approach architecture today?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: We were born in Fez, Morocco—a city that profoundly shaped the way we perceive space, light, materiality, and memory. More than a shared geography, we inherited a shared sensibility. Growing up between Morocco and France meant inhabiting different urban rhythms, different ways of constructing space, and different forms of social relationships. Over time, this duality evolved into an ongoing dialogue between us—sometimes explicit, often intuitive. As co-founders, our practice is not grounded in consensus, but in resonance. We continuously challenge and expand one another’s thinking, allowing each project to emerge from a productive space of tension rather than agreement.
Africans Column: Your work often begins with a close reading of place—its history, its materials, and its hidden layers. What does that process of reading a site look like for you in practice?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: Reading a site is a slow and layered act. We begin with what is visible—the topography, materials, light, and wind—but very quickly our attention shifts toward what is less apparent: traces of past uses, latent structures, cultural narratives, historical forms and archetypes, and sometimes even what is no longer there. We draw, write, collect fragments, and construct exploratory models that help us understand the forces at play. We often describe this process as an Atlas of Resonance—a way of mapping not only the physical conditions of a place, but also its invisible intensities and underlying currents.
Africans Column: There is a strong sense in your projects that architecture unfolds as an experience over time rather than a fixed object. How do you think about movement, sequence, and atmosphere when designing a space?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: We never conceive of architecture as an object. For us, it is closer to a sequence—a succession of atmospheres unfolding over time. Movement is essential, as it allows space to reveal itself gradually through experience. We work extensively with thresholds, transitions, compression and expansion, as well as variations in scale and light. A project is composed almost like a narrative, with an entrance, a spatial rhythm, moments of introversion, and moments of openness and connection to the landscape. What interests us is the way a body moves through space, and how this movement, in turn, generates meaning and shapes perception.
Africans Column: Your process moves fluidly between drawing, models, material studies, and construction. At what point, within your process together, does a project shift from exploration into something more defined and architectural?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: There is no clear shift between exploration and definition; rather, it is a gradual process. At a certain moment, a form begins to emerge. It gathers and holds together multiple intentions—territorial, spatial, structural, and material—and gradually asserts its own coherence. Yet even then, we continue to test and challenge it through collages, drawings, models, exchanges with engineers, and material experiments. A project becomes truly architectural when it is deeply rooted in its territory and landscape, while articulating a meaningful relationship with its users, yet still retaining a degree of openness and the capacity for further transformation.
Africans Column: You often describe architecture as an act of assembly—bringing together materials, systems, and references. How do you maintain that sense of openness and experimentation within the realities of building?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: Construction is not the end of experimentation; it is its continuation. We introduce the poetics of assembly directly within the building process, embedding flexibility into the very logic of the project through modular systems, prefabrication, and strategies that allow for variation. At the same time, we work closely with builders and craftsmen. The chantier becomes a space of dialogue, where unexpected adjustments can enrich the project. Assembly is, of course, first a constructive system—a virtuous one—bringing together prefabricated elements, dry construction methods, craft know-how, and off-site technologies. But for us, assembling is above all a cultural and social act. Each project becomes a way of weaving together different stories, cultures, and identities. In that sense, architecture is not only about building; it is about creating the conditions for people to come together.
Africans Column: Across your work, there is a dialogue between craftsmanship and industrial production, particularly through prefabrication and modular systems. What continues to interest you in this intersection today?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: What continues to fascinate us is the tension between precision and imperfection. Industrial processes offer efficiency, repetition, and control, while craftsmanship introduces variation, texture, and a human presence. We are interested in systems where both can coexist—where a prefabricated element can still retain a sense of singularity, and where repetition does not erase difference and diversity, but instead allows them to emerge. This intersection is not only technical; it is deeply cultural. It reflects the way we engage with contemporary modes of production while remaining connected to traditions of making, and to the diversity of gestures and forms of knowledge they embody.
Africans Column: Material plays a central role in your projects—not just technically, but emotionally and culturally. How do you approach material as something that carries meaning within architecture?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: Material is never neutral. It carries memory, geography, and cultural meaning. A material can evoke a landscape, a climate, a way of inhabiting the world. We approach materials not only through their performance, but through their capacity to resonate emotionally. Colour, texture, weight, and even smell can shape perception and experience. We are particularly drawn to clay concrete, glazed ceramics, bricks, and textured wood—materials that engage the senses and reveal different qualities of light and touch. In our work, materials are often slightly displaced, transformed, or reinterpreted so they can speak both of where they come from and the new context they inhabit.
Africans Column: In your renovation of the former Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé atelier in Paris, the project engages closely with memory, light, and the idea of opening space. How did you approach transforming a place with such a strong historical and cultural presence?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: That project was about listening, but also about revealing. The space was originally quite neutral, yet it held the potential for a strong presence—one shaped by creation, intimacy, history, and cultural narrative, as reflected in its Art Deco language, which we sought to bring forward. We worked through subtraction and the opening up of space, but also through precise interventions. Light became a primary tool, allowing us to shape the space and give it depth and intensity.
We drew from its Art Deco essence, revealing and enhancing its character to infuse this aesthetic into the lines and mouldings of the space. Through the modulation of surfaces, the original Le Corbusier glass blocks, the colour of the beams, the articulation between existing brick walls and new cellular concrete block walls, the treatment of the wooden roof, and the refinement of the steel joinery, we constructed an atmosphere that resonates with the artistic culture and creative energy of Paris in the 1930s. The golden wooden structure, punctuated by a constellation of zenithal openings, allows light to cascade through the space, creating a constantly shifting sensory experience. We sought to establish a continuity between past and present through atmosphere, material, and light, revealing the latent identity of the place.
Africans Column: In Aquazena, the swimming pool and wellness centre becomes more than a functional building—it brings together sport, leisure, and public life. How do you think about architecture as a space for collective experience and everyday rituals?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: In Aquazena, we were interested in architecture as a space for collective experience, where rituals become a foundation for shared life. Water is a powerful collective medium. It brings people together in a direct, physical way, through the body, movement, and proximity. We wanted to move beyond the idea of a technical facility and create a place that supports these encounters.
The building is conceived as a sequence of spaces unfolding vertically—from more intimate to more open—where different uses coexist: swimming, resting, wellbeing, training, and meeting. A continuous interior ramp gently leads from the pool hall to the rooftop, extending the movement of the body through the architecture. It culminates in a planted solarium open to the sky, where water, air, and light come together and reconnect the building to the city and its horizon.
We are particularly attentive to the rituals embedded in daily life. Simple actions such as entering the water, pausing, observing, or resting become moments of connection, both to oneself and to others. The pool hall, with its cobalt-blue concrete and zenithal light, was conceived as an immersive and sensory environment where light, water, sound, and material merge into a singular atmosphere.
Africans Column: Your Bordeaux Belcier project brings together housing, sport, culture, and public programmes within a single urban composition. How do you design for that level of complexity while maintaining clarity and coherence?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: Complexity requires structure. In Bordeaux, we approached the project not as a single object, but as a composition of distinct elements—a triptych in which each volume possesses its own identity. Housing, sports, and public programmes are distributed across three buildings positioned to frame views and open the site toward the river.
Rather than reducing complexity, we sought to organise it. Clarity emerges through relationships: how the volumes are positioned, how circulation connects them, and how the ground plane becomes a shared landscape. We often describe the project as an “urban mille-feuille”—a layered composition in which different uses and temporalities coexist within a single structure. This layering allows multiple audiences to inhabit the project simultaneously while maintaining a strong overall coherence. Each building expresses its own character through its façade and proportions, yet all are tied together through a common material language and a system of assembled prefabricated elements.
Africans Column: Many of your projects explore new ways of living together through flexible programmes and layered uses. What role do you think architecture plays today in shaping collective life?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: Architecture has a fundamental role in shaping how we live together. Today, collective life is evolving. Programmes are no longer fixed; they shift over time, requiring spaces that are flexible, inclusive, and open to multiple forms of use and appropriation.
We see architecture as a framework that can activate these possibilities. Through spatial sequences, layered programmes, and carefully articulated thresholds, we try to create environments that encourage encounters, coexistence, and shared experiences. We are particularly interested in the rituals embedded in everyday life. Simple gestures—moving through space, gathering, pausing—can become the foundation for new forms of collective living. In that sense, architecture is not something that imposes a way of living, but something that prepares the ground for it. It creates the conditions for life to unfold, for relationships to emerge, and for a shared imagination to take shape over time.
Africans Column: Looking ahead, what questions or challenges are currently driving your work—both individually and as a practice—and where do you see it evolving in the coming years?
Selma & Salwa Mikoü: We are increasingly interested in questions of memory and transformation. How can architecture engage with what already exists—history, cultural narratives, materials, structures, and landscapes—without erasing them? How can we build in a more reversible and sustainable way while acknowledging the layers that precede us?
At the same time, we are exploring new forms of assembly, particularly through off-site construction and material research, as a way to rethink how architecture is made and how it can adapt over time. Looking ahead, we see our work evolving toward more hybrid forms at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and cultural practice, where building becomes not only a physical act but also a cultural, ecological, and social one.
In an era when architecture is increasingly confronted with questions of sustainability, identity, cultural continuity, and social cohesion, Mikoü Architecture offers a compelling alternative to architecture as spectacle. Through their Atlas of Resonance, Selma and Salwa Mikoü demonstrate that buildings can function as instruments of memory, revealing the stories, materials, and relationships that already exist within a place. Their work suggests that architecture’s most important role may not be to create something entirely new, but to uncover and amplify what has long been present.
Whether working on urban developments, cultural spaces, wellness centres, or adaptive reuse projects, the sisters continue to position architecture as a practice of listening, assembling, and connecting. Rooted in the spatial heritage of Fez while engaging with contemporary modes of construction and global architectural discourse, Mikoü Architecture is building a body of work that bridges past and future, craft and technology, local narratives and universal questions about how we live together.
