Twenty years and roughly forty completed projects into a career spent renovating buildings other architects would have demolished, Mathieu Berge is no longer interested in being called nostalgic. He runs a small firm on the third floor of a former printing house in the eleventh arrondissement, takes the métro to work most days, and keeps a folded sketch in the inside pocket of his coat that he has not, in nineteen years, shown to anyone.
Your firm only works on adaptive reuse. Why never new construction?
Because every building is mid-sentence when you find it. The job is to finish the sentence, not to rewrite the paragraph. New construction is writing the paragraph. That is also a job. It is not my job.
You have called yourself stubborn rather than nostalgic. What is the difference?
Nostalgia is a feeling. Stubbornness is a practice. I have very little time for the first and a great deal of patience for the second. I do not love old buildings because they are old. I love them because they are still here, and that is information.
The drawing in your pocket — what is it?
A doorway. I sketched it when I was nineteen, in a village in Provence I have not been back to. I have not built it. I keep it because it asks me a question every day, and I have not yet answered the question.
When you walk into a building you are about to renovate, what is the first thing you do?
Stand still. People think the first thing is to measure. It is to listen. Buildings have weather, the way a room has weather. You wait for the weather to introduce itself.
How do you know when a project is finished?
When the building stops complaining. There is a moment, near the end, when the rooms agree with what we have done. Until then, you can feel them sulking. I am not joking. Anyone who has done this work for long enough will tell you the same.
What is the worst architectural advice you have ever been given?
"Just open it up." This is sometimes correct. Most of the time it is the architect surrendering to a client who is afraid of small rooms. Small rooms are not the problem. The problem is almost always the doorway.