This interview features Salwa and Selma Mikoü born in Fez, Morocco, twin sisters, French-Moroccan architects and co-founders of Mikoü Architecture, established in Paris in 2008.
Their shared practice has developed a Franco-Moroccan architectural language that translates North African spatial memory: thresholds, patios, light, water, shade, materiality, craftsmanship and collective hospitality into contemporary public buildings, cultural places and urban projects.
In this interview, Salwa and Selma discuss their professional backgrounds and the founding of Mikoü Architecture in Paris, exploring their research into low-carbon materials and bio-based construction, and how these ideas inform their practice.
They also reflect on working as equal partners, navigating creative and professional challenges.
Tell us about your background, and what led you, as twin sisters, to co-found Mikoü Architecture in Paris in 2008.
We were born in Fez, where our first experience of architecture was the house we lived in: its courtyard, the sky above it, the intimacy of family life, and the presence of the neighbourhood beyond.
Our mother instilled in us a strong belief in women’s independence and encouraged us to forge our own paths. Later, meeting the Moroccan architect Jean-François Zevaco in Casablanca helped us understand that Moroccan culture could inspire an architecture of extraordinary freedom.
We studied at Paris-Belleville, then followed different professional paths: Salwa with Jean Nouvel and Selma with Renzo Piano. When we founded our practice in Paris in 2008, we wanted to give our own questions room to grow.
Being twins gave us a deep foundation of trust; our differences meant that we always had something to learn from each other. We wanted to bring our Moroccan and French experiences together and carry the care for others that shaped our childhood into our buildings.
What are the visions, goals or principles of your practice? How does a project like Casa Anfa or the Moroccan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale reflect them?
We want people to feel that a building has made room for them. The Moroccan and Arab cultures we grew up with taught us the value of hospitality, the generosity of shared space and the care required to preserve intimacy. These lessons inform our work in France and Morocco.
Our Atlas of Resonance begins by listening to a place and the lives it holds. At Casa Anfa, our proposal gives former aviation halls a new life as a campus for culture and entrepreneurship, where people can gather, create and learn from one another.
Our contribution to the Moroccan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale explored how a landscape shaped by phosphate extraction at Boucraa could become a place to live.
In both projects, we see memory as something people can build upon. We want younger generations to draw on this inheritance while finding the freedom to imagine their own ways of living together.
You’ve described architecture as “an act of assembly: assembling uses, communities, materials, memories and construction systems.” Can you expand on this?
Assembly begins with recognising that a place is already made of many histories. We bring these histories into contact with the people who will inhabit the place and with new uses.
At the Simone Veil campus in Boulogne-Billancourt, the preserved Renault pediment carries the memory of work and industry into a place of learning. Shared spaces connect the school to the city, while materials and light give the interior its own atmosphere.
At the Aquazena swimming pool, our memories of the hammam informed the sequence from the changing rooms to the showers, the water and the open sky above the roof.
Our Moroccan identity makes us attentive to the spaces between activities: a threshold where someone pauses, a courtyard that brings people together, a quieter place within a collective building. These relationships need as much design attention as the rooms themselves.
Construction gives these relationships a physical form. The way a beam meets a wall, or the way a material filters light, can connect technical knowledge with cultural memory.
This is our poetics of assembly.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced running a practice as equal partners, and how have you navigated moments of disagreement?
Being twins does not mean seeing the same thing. We can share a memory and draw very different architectural possibilities from it. The challenge is to give each perspective enough space, especially when deadlines demand a quick answer.
We often begin by drawing separately, then bring our drawings into conversation. When we disagree, we try to understand what matters in the other’s proposal.
A model, a section, or a discussion with our team can help us discover something neither of us had seen alone and let a third voice emerge.
Working in an environment where our ideas were often questioned has also made this private space of dialogue precious. We need to be able to express doubt, because doubt is a starting point for discussion.
For us, equality includes the freedom to challenge each other and the responsibility to support the decisions we make together.
Tell us about your research into low-carbon materials, prefabrication and bio-based construction, and how it feeds into what you call “a manufacture of architecture.”
Growing up around Moroccan craftsmanship made us pay close attention to how things are made. A joint, a surface, or a repeated element can carry knowledge from one generation to the next.
Our research asks how this knowledge can inform contemporary production and help us build with fewer resources.
At Bordeaux Art de Rives Tryptych, we worked with prefabricated construction systems and clay-concrete facade elements made from locally sourced earth, connecting industrial manufacturing with the city’s mineral character.
The renovation of the former atelier of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in Paris brought another dimension to this research. Working within a listed site with an Art Deco heritage, we had to use dry construction. In collaboration with Ateliers de France, all the new structural elements were prefabricated in the factory before being assembled on site.
We approached the existing fabric as a resource, not simply as a historical image. Its timber, brick and metal became the starting point for a contemporary intervention, with new materials extending this dialogue.
For us, sustainability also means extending the life of what already exists- not only conserving its materials, but keeping the knowledge and memory embodied in them alive.
Our Manufacture of Architecture brings architects, engineers, manufacturers and craftspeople together from the outset.
We work across scales, from the structural system to the hand-touched detail. We pay particular attention to singular modules and the details of their assembly, which together form the overall figure, much like a piece of marquetry.
Off-site and dry construction methods let us better control carbon emissions, minimise waste, and favour cleaner construction sites, with less disruption for local residents.
We want environmental responsibility to deepen the architecture’s material and sensory qualities.
What are you working on now?
Art de Rives in Bordeaux is approaching completion. Housing, student accommodation, sports and wellness facilities come together beside the Garonne.
It is a demanding opportunity to bring collective life and our research into assembly into the same urban project, exploring how the way we build can carry the character of a place.
At Art de Rives, this question takes a material form. Clay-concrete elements, prefabricated off-site and assembled beside the Garonne, reinterpret the mineral character of Bordeaux. Repetition becomes rhythm, and relief catches the changing light.
Across the three buildings, places to live, study, create and swim become part of a shared urban composition. For us, assembly is as much about bringing different lives together as it is about joining materials.
At Casa Anfa in Casablanca, we are exploring how former aviation halls can become places for contemporary culture, popular arts and entrepreneurship.
Working in Morocco carries a particular emotion: we return with the experience gained in France and with questions that have accompanied us since childhood.
We are also designing a museum park for a private collector: a collection of distinctive galleries woven into the landscape, from intimate rooms to a rotunda opening onto a sculpture garden.
Each offers a different encounter with art through light, scale and atmosphere. The project asks what a museum can mean today, and how it can make room for both personal contemplation and shared cultural life.
What connects these projects is our wish to create places people can make their own, bringing uses, encounters, and meanings we could never fully anticipate.
As two people running a practice as equal partners, what’s a moment a client or contractor pushed back on how you made decisions together, and what did you do about it?
What stays with us is that this became a recurring experience, especially after we established our own practice and began winning competitions in France. Many of our buildings have been built here.
We had to establish our authority in a highly competitive construction sector where power and technical competence were strongly associated with men. Our gender and our Arab origins both became grounds for questioning our legitimacy. We encountered sexism and anti-Arab racism.
The anonymity of architectural competitions could give the project a fairer hearing. In meetings and on building sites, however, we had to defend both the design and our authority to carry it through.
Winning a commission did not erase those prejudices.
We responded through rigorous preparation, detailed knowledge of our projects and solidarity with one another. We also needed space between us to question the work without undermining our mutual trust.
The deeper struggle was to preserve our freedom to think. At stake was also our freedom to bring our whole selves to the work. We wanted our Moroccan and Arab roots to remain present in French public buildings: in hospitality, generous shared spaces, and a care for privacy and dignity.
Building that contribution into French schools and public facilities has been profoundly meaningful to us.
We believe deeply in multiculturalism. We are all shaped by different places, languages and encounters; our identities are plural and continually evolving. For us, this hybridity is a source of strength, allowing us to understand more than one way of inhabiting the world.
As we build, we are also building ourselves, as people and as women. Each project tests our convictions and expands what we feel able to do. Defending our place in architecture has meant finding the confidence to speak from all that we are, while making room for others to do the same.
What’s a piece of advice you’d give two young women thinking about starting a practice together, rather than each going it alone?
Choose someone with whom you can think freely, even when you disagree. A partnership needs enough trust for each person to admit uncertainty, and enough respect for neither person’s voice to disappear.
Make equality practical from the beginning. Discuss how you will share income and workload, credit each other’s work, represent the practice and make difficult decisions.
Make sure both partners have access to the knowledge, relationships and responsibilities through which professional authority is built. Friendship and enthusiasm need that practical care.
For young women, particularly those whose origins expose them to prejudice, we would also say: Take care not to let other people’s assumptions become your own limits. Protect what your history lets you see.
At the same time, learn the technical and financial realities of practice. They give you the means to defend your work. Support each other’s authority, acknowledge each other’s contribution, and build relationships with people who respect you.
Our times call for us to work collectively, share knowledge and bring different forms of expertise into dialogue. Architecture is a collective, social and political endeavour.
We have an urgent responsibility to understand society’s needs and the profound transformations shaping people’s lives, and to translate that understanding into spaces and uses.
Opening ourselves to the world and its complexity lets us question our assumptions and move closer to the truth of lived experience. A good partnership should give each of you more room to become the architect you want to be.
Which project have you both worked on that is the closest to your hearts and why?
Jean Lurçat Middle School in Saint-Denis holds a very particular place in our hearts. As arab women with more than one cultural identity, we feel close to the question of how young people can belong to a shared world while finding their own voice.
Saint-Denis is a suburb of Paris shaped by generations of migration and by West and North African cultures.
We wanted students from different cultural backgrounds to experience the values of French public education while also having spaces for personal expression and imagination.
Light, colour, material texture, and sheltered patios brought poetry into everyday life.
In our educational buildings, we have noticed that young people perceive the care invested in a space as a sign of attention to them. This is what touches us most: Architecture can make that attention tangible.
Beyond providing classrooms, we wanted every student to feel recognised, to sense that their presence mattered and that the spaces had been designed with them in mind.
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Salwa & Selma Mikoü — We Are Building Ourselves
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Meet the Shortlist series is a compilation of interviews with those who have been shortlisted for our awards. Saliha Benmessaoud is on the shortlist for the Women in Architecture and Construction Award, which recognises women who have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa.
Meet the Shortlist: Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Dr Hiba Alkhalaf, Jomana Baddad, Meisa Batayneh, Nuha Dandis, Ronak Roshan Gilvaei, Saliha Benmessaoud, Salima Naji, and Dr Zahra Hussain.
Tamayouz Excellence Award is sponsored by 99 Properties Development, Coventry University, Dewan Architects + Engineers, the Mohamed Makiya Foundation, Bonair Ltd, Aji Group, and Round City Magazine.