Éjo.coopérative, and the art of commitment
Following the example of Amateur Architecture Studio (Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu) in the mountains of Hangzhou province, China (read their portrait initially published in AA no. 431), or Atelier du Rouget in the Cantal region of France, there are many agencies that make a commitment to the ‘margins’, preferring rural territories to the density of big cities to develop their practice. Éjo.coopérative, founded in 2019 in Saône-et-Loire, is one of them. It has chosen to build ‘on a territory limited to a department and its margins’. This gives us the opportunity to refine our knowledge of the area with each intervention.
Yên Bui
Éjo.coopérative began with a word, \’e.jo\ – ‘place’, ‘site’ or ‘building site’ in Esperanto – chosen by four partners: landscape designer Lucie Garzon and architects Fanny Costecalde, Benjamin Froger and Guillaume Wittmann, who graduated from Versailles, Paris and Strasbourg. It’s in Mont-Saint-Vincent, a village of 350 souls in Saône-et-Loire (Burgundy-Franche-Comté) in East France that the société coopérative et participative (often abbreviated to ‘SCOP’, a structure in which employees are the majority partners) will set up in 2019. When asked why they chose to set up in rural areas, the Éjo members describe their ‘desire to participate in the revitalisation of these areas, which are currently neglected, but which nonetheless contain a wealth of landscapes. Together, the architects and landscape architects are working to ‘preservation of a rural territory’, working on both public contracts and private commissions. ‘For us, living and working in this region is as much a professional commitment as it is a personal one,’ says Lucie Garzon.
Since 2019, Éjo has been working on an increasing number of architectural and development projects – new construction, transformation and renovation – on a variety of scales – single-family homes, school cafeterias, revitalisation of town centres – delivered within the geographical perimeter it has set itself. In 2022, Éjo also published a guide to ‘architectural and landscape recommendations’ on behalf of the Morvan Regional Nature Park, which, in addition to providing a landscape history of human settlement in the region, serves as a reference for the smooth construction of buildings on their sites (with suggested principles for volume composition, for example), local building systems based on traditional methods, and the choice of materials that interact with the landscape.
The following year, the architects completed a 160-sq.m steel and timber hall in the grounds of the Maison des patrimoines in the town of Matour (pictured below), just 47 kilometres from Mont-Saint-Vincent. An opportunity to use local resources such as oak and Douglas fir in an environment that is both heritage and landscaped. The humility of their interventions should not obscure their intention: to work towards the revitalisation of village centres. Not far away, for the municipality of Saint-Martin-sous-Montaigu, the architects have rehabilitated an old stone school, dating from the 19th century, to house the town hall, a community centre and housing.
Their latest project, a 250-sq.m school restaurant in Demigny completed in 2024, is built like a ‘hut at the end of a garden’, with particular attention paid to the concrete base, which enabled them to take advantage of the sloping ground to place the tables at garden level.
Éjo has also transformed several farmhouses into housing units. Their status, as a cooperative but also as an association, enables them to carry out studies, in which Éjo makes it a point of honour to propose as many citizen exchanges as possible, and in which they also organise occupied micro-construction sites whenever possible. This was the case, for example, during the sketch of the guide plan for the town centre of La Marche.
Éjo.coopérative, which was awarded the Trophée de la Parité dans les agences d’architecture [Trophy for Parity in Architectural Agencies. Ed.] in 2023 by the Ordre des architectes, did not stop there, as it also won the Albums des Jeunes Architectes et Paysagistes [Young Architects and Landscape Architects Albums. Ed.], organised by the Ministry of Culture, in the same year. In September 2024, Éjo coopérative joined the latest intake of the SANA incubator at Clermont-Ferrand school of architecture.
To learn more about Éjo: www.ejo.coop
