This text was not born in a design office or a school. It began as a conversation, then as an opinion piece published under the title “Tomorrow architecture will be Pop Modern or it will not be,” and from the shared conviction of its two authors — Alain Sarfati and Jean-Claude Ribaut — that it was necessary to go further than a newspaper article.

We do not claim to bring a line of thought to a close, but to open it to others. This is the meaning of the process we are initiating around the Venice International Architecture Biennale.

We know that the word Pop invites misunderstanding. We address that risk later in this text. We also know that any attempt to name a movement risks being frozen into a style before it has been understood as a position.

This document states intentions, not forms.

We distrust images. An image can be copied; an intention can be discussed, extended and contradicted — and it is precisely in its capacity to be contradicted that we locate its value.

The diagnosis

We must begin with a simple and widely documented fact: contemporary architecture is not loved. Not because it has become less knowledgeable — it has never been more so, equipped with calculations, environmental standards and simulation tools unknown to any previous generation. Yet this growing competence has turned against its own purpose. The more architecture has demonstrated technical mastery, the further it has seemed to move away from those who inhabit it.

This separation has a history. Modernism sought to break with ornament and history in the name of function and hygiene; postmodernism reintroduced history, but as quotation and scholarly reference reserved for those who understood the codes; deconstructivism made form itself a critical discourse, often at the expense of dialogue with use.

Three moments, three ruptures, and each time the same underlying gesture: a discipline thinking from within itself and speaking first to other architects.

Over the past century architecture has been divided into engineering, thermal performance, safety standards, construction economics and image-making. Each expertise was refined separately until we lost what Alberti placed at the heart of the architect’s role: the ability to connect.

To connect bodies of knowledge. To connect a building with those who will inhabit, alter and appropriate it. To connect the work with the long duration of time.

This text begins with the conviction that the task of the coming generation is no longer to divide further — that has been achieved with undeniable technical success — but to connect again.

And artificial intelligence?

“Everything must change so that what is essential may remain.”

Artificial intelligence will transform the architect’s tools. It will never define the reasons for building. To the question “What will become of the architectural profession?”, AI already answers: it will evolve. But the only decisive question lies elsewhere:

What architecture do we want to pass on?

What idea of the city, the landscape and society do we want to inscribe in time? AI will calculate, optimise, simulate, draw and compare. It will neither desire nor choose a civilisation.

The real challenge is therefore not to produce buildings more quickly, but to restore the project’s cultural, symbolic and human dimension.

Architecture is not an accumulation of objects. It is a relationship among inhabitants, a territory, a memory and a future. It must recover the capacity to create meaning, stir emotion, make the city more habitable, legible and desirable, and form connections with the living world.

Artificial intelligence will transform the way we design. It will never replace our responsibility.

What we mean by “pop”

The word invites two interpretations, and they must be carefully distinguished.

The first treats “pop” as a synonym for easy, consumable and decorative — architecture as a sales product, a negotiable image aimed at a public presumed to be undemanding. That is not our meaning.

This interpretation already has a history, and that history is a warning. Pop Art arose from a democratic impulse — drawing its material from advertising, serial objects and mass culture — before being absorbed within a generation by galleries and the art market.

We accept this risk with open eyes. An architecture calling itself desirable may likewise be appropriated by developers as a marketing argument rather than a design criterion.

Popular in the most literal sense: arising from people and use, and returning to them.

Our interpretation places appropriation, emotion and the pleasure of everyday users at the centre — not only the intention, however learned, of the person who draws the building.

This is not a retreat from disciplinary rigour. It shifts architecture’s centre of gravity from the author toward the user, without sacrificing the author.

III

Connecting: Alberti’s lesson

We return willingly to the phrase we attribute to Alberti, not because of his authority, but because of its practical precision: the architect is the one who knows how to divide and how to connect.

Dividing is an analytical gesture: breaking down a problem, distributing expertise, specialising knowledge. Necessary as it is, it has never been sufficient.

Connecting is the reverse gesture, and the one the discipline has most neglected: recomposing and holding together contradictory structural, social, sensory, economic and ecological demands without sacrificing one to another.

We see ourselves as creators of connections more than creators of forms.

A connection is not an image that can be photographed and circulated. It is a relational quality among a place, a use and a time, verified only through duration and through the real use made of it by inhabitants.

The intentions

We offer neither a formal vocabulary nor a set of prescriptions. We state six intentions and accept that they may remain in tension with one another.

Join the debate

Desire

Architecture may be structurally, thermally and legally correct without being loved. Desirability must become a design criterion in its own right.

Appropriate

A building begins to live when users alter it, fill it with their habits and reinvent the uses imagined by its designers.

Move

Emotion is not decorative varnish. It is part of architectural experience and deserves to be considered from the first sketch.

Evolve

To design for evolution is to integrate change into the project’s structure rather than endure it as a pathology.

Adapt

Adaptable architecture anticipates that it will one day serve purposes no one, not even its authors, foresaw.

Endure

Sustainability is not one intention among others: it is the condition that makes all the others possible.

DEBATE

Prologue

THE DEBATE IS OPEN…

“After the century of doctrines comes the century of values.”

The twentieth century produced great architecture because it believed in great certainties. Each period thought it could define a doctrine capable of answering every question: function, technology, industry, form and progress. These visions profoundly transformed the world. They also revealed their limits.

The twenty-first century opens in a radically different situation. Climate challenges, resource depletion, social fractures, demographic change and the arrival of artificial intelligence make any new orthodoxy illusory. The task is no longer to seek a single model, but to recover the ability to exercise judgment.

The Pop Modern Architecture Movement was not created to impose another doctrine. It was created because it has become urgent to reaffirm that architecture is first and foremost a cultural, political and human responsibility.

We refuse to let tomorrow’s cities become the mere consequence of calculations, algorithms or measurable performance. Artificial intelligence is an unprecedentedly powerful tool: it can assist design, explore thousands of hypotheses and optimise resources. But it cannot desire, transmit or hope. It knows neither the memory of places, nor the emotions of inhabitants, nor the symbolic value of landscapes. Those choices belong to human intelligence.

The architect must not simply adapt to artificial intelligence. The architect must impose upon it a project for civilisation.

That is why we speak of Pop Modern architecture. “Pop”, not because it seeks effect or fashion, but because it addresses everyone and recognises ordinary cultures, local memories, skills, everyday uses and the diversity of territories. “Modern”, not through loyalty to a bygone era, but because it fully embraces the scientific knowledge, new technologies and environmental demands of our time.

Between these two requirements lies an ambition: to reconcile creation, technology and the common good.

The pages that follow are not a fixed programme. They seek neither disciples nor certainties. They offer questions, intuitions and sometimes convictions, always open to discussion. Their only ambition is to create a space in which architects, urban planners, engineers, elected representatives, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and citizens may confront their ideas.

Great architecture is never born from repeating old answers. It is born when we dare to reformulate the right questions.

To contribute to the discussion, propose a translation, a meeting or a partnership:

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Manifesto

MANIFESTO — TOWARDS POP MODERNITY

Faced with new human and technological demands, the twenty-first century must invent its own modernity. We sought an ideal place to provoke a response from the architectural world: the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale, with Leon Battista Alberti opening a path of elegance rather than monumentality.

For the first time in history, the architect is no longer the only one capable of designing. Artificial intelligence already produces images, plans and projects at a speed that overturns established habits. The real question is not what AI can draw, but what we want to build.

Pop Architecture seeks to return architecture to the intersection of technology, culture and the desire to inhabit. AI is changing the world. We must learn to drive, or we will be driven directly by algorithms.

More than ever, we need a shareable project capable of responding to diverse situations with diverse answers: no immutable dogma, no untouchable line, no reductive principles. Housing alone demands a transformed approach, because land and financing will not be enough when three billion additional people must be accommodated on the planet within thirty years.

Time is pressing. AI is arguably the greatest revolution in architectural design since industrial drawing. Yet it raises the essential question: who will formulate the project?

AI has no sensory memory, historical consciousness or civic responsibility. Left to itself, it reproduces, combines and optimises brilliantly. It cannot choose a direction. The danger is not a machine becoming creative, but an architecture placed on autopilot, endlessly reproducing forms, procedures and models inherited from a century whose limits are now obvious.

A society cannot delegate its imagination to an algorithm. Architecture remains a cultural act before it is a calculation. The issue is not how to replace the architect, but how to enable the architect to direct this new power in the service of a human project. That is precisely the ambition of Pop Architecture.

Why is architecture so often unloved? Because it too often produces meaning only for architects. How can it become desirable, necessary, shareable, appropriable, popular and generous?

Architecture is an artistic project that expresses a vision of society. It must produce meaning and connection. It is political in the noble sense because it concerns the city and what we build together. It concerns democracy and social bonds: we must reconnect what has been scattered—or what we ourselves have dismantled.

We cannot say that architecture writes our history and then take no interest in it. More than ever, architecture is a social project made visible in the shaping of our living environment.

The past fifty years have produced a fragmented and dispersed project. We must now recreate connections at every level. What vision should elected officials give architecture? What place should cultural institutions give to renewed architectural education? What city can follow the failure of contemporary urbanism?

We must redefine a line and establish a perspective, using history as a foundation and beginning with Leon Battista Alberti, one of the inventors of the modern figure of the architect—a definition that AI makes unexpectedly current.

Alberti transformed architecture from the mere act of building into a cultural discipline that carries meaning. He distinguished intellectual conception—thinking, ordering, ranking and giving meaning—from technical implementation—assembling materials, resolving constraints and building.

For centuries these dimensions remained inseparable. AI is now transforming the second and partly the first. It can calculate structures, optimise flows, generate plan variants, analyse climate data, produce carbon assessments, simulate uses, create images and soon complete models.

Yet Alberti does not define the architect as the person who builds, but as the person who knows why they build. Tomorrow’s architect may no longer be the best draughtsperson or fastest producer of plans, but the person who directs the machine toward a meaningful project.

The architect’s role must shift toward that of a guardian of the project’s conscience, sharing not merely a definition of architecture but a perspective, a horizon and a culture.

Pop Architecture can reopen abandoned questions: meaning, emotion and beauty—not a fixed beauty, but one open to evolution, adaptability and context, capable of reflecting the world’s complexity.

The central question is not whether AI will draw better than architects. It will. The real question is: what should we ask it to draw?

Twentieth-century movements answered through systems: modernism through function, postmodernism through sign, deconstructivism through fragmentation and parametric architecture through the algorithm.

Pop Architecture must be not a style but a method for reading reality, nature and culture. It begins with a simple hypothesis: architecture must once again be immediately understandable to those who inhabit it. After expressing the power of the powerful, it must open itself to life.

AI can become an extraordinary tool for making projects still guided by human values, while the architect becomes a pilot able to navigate any weather provided there is a course.

Pop Architecture seeks not only unprecedented forms, but forms that make room for chance, context, climate, complexity and diversity. It seeks to create places that are loved.

We must learn to look again and recognise that sophisticated tools can homogenise the world. Early software enabled increasingly complex objects, while most construction remained desperately neutral and flavourless.

Early AI may reinforce that direction. Yet computing power need not increase complexity; it can also help recover simplicity.

Alberti appears strikingly contemporary: not a technician, but a mediator between knowledge and the human condition. Tomorrow’s humanist architect will not fight AI, but impose a cultural project upon it.

The architect must continue to ask the right questions. AI will produce answers; the architect will guide each project safely to its destination. This is a contemporary reformulation of a humanist ideal: technology at the service of humanity, not humanity at the service of technology.

Pop Architecture is a natural architecture that uses technology for what it is and makes its artistic dimension the support of a social bond.

Alain Sarfati — Jean-Claude Ribaut, June 2026

The acknowledged gap

There is a gap between a cultural aim — what architectural culture recognises as learned, inventive and situated within its history and theory — and a sociological aim — what inhabitants actually feel, appropriate and desire in everyday life.

We do not seek to close this gap artificially, nor pretend that it does not exist in the name of a superficial reconciliation. An architecture claiming to satisfy learned demands and popular expectations equally and without tension would probably be dishonest about one of them.

This gap is the very site of architectural work.

It is by inhabiting this tension, project by project and context by context, that a singular response can be built — never a model to be transferred unchanged.

Why Venice, why now

The twentieth Venice International Architecture Biennale will open in May 2027. The French Pavilion will be led by the Particules agency with a project exploring the space between self and other on the fiftieth anniversary of the French Architecture Act of 1977.

That law states in its first article that architecture is an expression of culture and that its quality is a matter of public interest. This framework resonates directly with ours.

We see this convergence as an opportunity not to replace the official curatorship, but to propose a contribution — a round table, text or intervention — extending these shared intentions into public debate.

To restore architecture’s visibility and its dimension of public usefulness.

VII

A plural gesture: an appeal to other pavilions

Our ambition does not end with a French contribution. The Venice Biennale brings together dozens of national pavilions, each free in its argument and form.

The diagnosis opening this text — learned architecture that is little loved, technically accomplished yet socially distant — is not unique to France. In different forms and intensities, it crosses most European architectural cultures.

We therefore invite pavilions sharing all or part of these intentions — notably those of Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and Spain, without exclusivity — to join this reflection.

Not to produce a common style or a single manifesto erasing differences, but to affirm together, each from its own culture and language, that another way of making architecture is desirable and is better conceived collectively than in isolation.

Each pavilion will bring its own contradictions, traditions and language — translated, not flattened.

VIII

Proposed methods

This document is designed to be translated — first into Italian, English, German and Spanish — and circulated in multilingual form among the curators of national pavilions likely to recognise themselves in it.

It is not intended to be signed as it stands. We want it to be amended, contradicted and completed by every interlocutor wishing to take part, potentially leading to a collectively drafted declaration before May 2027 and to one or more public moments during the Biennale.

The text therefore has two distinct lives. The first, inward-facing, helps us build together: it is a working document, open to debate and revision.

The second, outward-facing, makes the movement known beyond the circle of its initiators.

This text is not finished. It calls on other voices to extend, translate and contradict it — until it becomes a conversation broad enough to be held publicly, in Venice, in 2027.

Mouvement d’Architecture Pop Moderne

contact@mapm.fr