Theo Domini, a visionary French architect based in Bordeaux, draws from a pastoral family heritage and formative experiences in Granada’s Albaicín to craft architecture rooted in vernacular simplicity and contemplative essence. A Europe 40under40 award winner and guest lecturer since 2023 at RCR Arquitectes’ International Workshop in Olot, Spain, he leads a multidisciplinary practice spanning architecture and interior design. His projects—published internationally—embrace raw emotion, essential forms, and rhythmic interplay of light, weather, and place, freeing spaces from excess to intensify human connection with surroundings.
GDN: What Are The Principles Guiding Your Architectural Projects?
Theo Domini: I believe the singularity of our work arises from who we are, from what surrounds us and infiltrates the way we look at the world. These experiences move through us, settle upon us, and become bearers of pulses. What contaminates us always ends up contaminating our works.
My projects instinctively translate a family heritage tied to the experience of pastoral life. In this remote part of Basque Country, the demands of daily labor, subject to the variations of rain, wind, and time, intensify the relationship one maintains with the beauty of what surrounds us.
These rugged lands, whose atmospheres have been polished by time, animals, and humans, carry a gravity that forges character. The shelters found there exhale our feral scents, reminders of the primitive human embedded in our bodies, and lead us back to the truth of inner experience. All of this has a very profound influence on my personality and on my work. The things that were fraternal to me, shelters, mountains, hard labor, earth, stones, old wood, rusted iron. These rough things marked me. I prefer them to pure, lifeless materials.
One cannot rid oneself of this hardness, of this brutality in its noblest sense; it becomes the necessary nourishment for inspiration. In this mountain life there is, at times, a frustrating feeling that, as in architecture, one creates something over which control can only be brief and fleeting.
It is a way to seeing architecture as a revealer rather than as a force dominating what is already there.
This privileged relationship allows us to reach an expression of architecture in its purest form. From these experiences of bareness is built a confrontation with what is essential, shaping a taste for the contemplative.
Our perception, thus unburdened, introduces us to a way of living more intensely.
GDN: How Do You Balance Environmental Consciousness With Client Needs In Your Submitted Work?
Theo Domini: An interesting work must always deploy an economy of means in order to touch the nakedness of life. These architectural experiences possess deeply curative and instructive virtues. They make us aware of ourselves, of others, of beauty, and of what surrounds us. They educate us in the luxury of relativity. Architecture is something very close to the body; it is a fine interface, like an extending skin. It is the discovery of physical pleasure, of movement and progression; it is a time for contemplating forms, textures, and materials, where perception nourishes and precedes understanding.
In my aspiration toward the cabin there is an idea of simplifying life, of tightening it around a few objects and a few archaic acts. What moves me, animates me, and reaches far within me rests on these primitive and universal emotions that emanate from the earth. They return us to complex, timeless values.
Our gaze, however, is always modern, because it belongs to the present. This is a necessary condition for entering into dialogue with the world, for tasting grandeur, or drawing near to it.
I like things that have flavor: walking, taking the stairs. I like true warmth, true cold, not conditioned atmospheres. The need for comfort once filled the void in the lives of the more affluent. Now that it has spread, this need makes everyone a little soft and pushes us to the need of reconsidering our own notion of comfort.
Turning the twelve months of a year into a permanently conditioned atmosphere is a regression, harmful to both body and mind. We must reconnect with the pleasure of seasonality, erased by the lures of automation that encourage us to believe a house is a diving suit.
To experience architecture is to enter into conversation with our senses and with what surrounds us.
GDN: How Has Receiving The Europe 40under40 Award Influenced Your Approach To Future Projects?
Theo Domini: One cannot progress in architecture without revealing oneself to others. Any idea, any story exists only if it is defended with the rhetorical tools that allow it to harden so as to endure, and to gain intelligibility.
Awards, like architecture perhaps, are bridges that lead to others. I privilege coherence rather than change, and within this approach awards appear more as reinforcements and sources of encouragement than as goals.
Works come into being along this path made of exchanges and unforeseen encounters, with all the attention one gives to discovery. They bear witness to a way of being in the world.
GDN: What Legacy Do You Hope Your Generation Of Architects Leaves Behind?
Theo Domini: Whatever the subject that animates us and that we wish to pass on, what seems essential to me is always to consider that every subject, however small it may be, can be brought back to fundamental questions of architecture. Even when approaching an absolutely minimal intervention, one can touch the immense.
If one is sincere and sufficiently constant in what one produces, what resonates within us may eventually resonate in others. When our commitment becomes something that can be learned, what exists in a more withdrawn way ends up existing and radiating beyond our immediate circle. Little by little, it succeeds in arousing interest, the desire to come closer, to make the effort.
