Architect Ariel André of GOLEM on designing for bees, cats and blind visitors

Ariel André, who founded the Paris studio GOLEM after years at OMA in Rotterdam, writes for designboom about an architecture shaped around pleasure rather than convention. He traces it to childhood, when he soothed himself after nightmares by imagining being a bee asleep in a flower or a bird in a feathered nest, and contrasts that with a built world that, in his view, dictates how we live.

His clearest example is Broken Hearts Bazaar, the entrance and food-market kiosks for the first Bukhara Biennial. He designed them for those who don't see architecture: blind visitors, and the city's cats and wasps. The conical timber kiosks echo Silk Road spice mounds and are coloured with real spices: paprika red, dill green, black tea and clover blossom. A blind passer-by came back with fifteen friends to identify them by smell; cats licked the paprika walls at night.

He also describes Amoreba, a mushroom-inspired surface that becomes a conversation pit in a Brussels curator's flat; a 24-metre communal sofa in the Public Program Building for the Diriyah Biennale Foundation in Riyadh, based on how people across Saudi Arabia sit in public; and Lamputée, lamps moulded from amputated limbs.

It's an opinion piece rather than a project report, and a thoughtful one for anyone curious about who buildings are really made for.

Our summary of a story from designboom, published 26 October 2026. Read the original