Spotted as early as the Prix de la Première Œuvre in 2007 for the Cité Artisanale de Valbonne, Pierre-André Comte and Stéphane Vollenweider cultivate a rigorous architecture, often radical in its minimalist materiality, its effects amplified through masterfully manipulated archetypal forms, sculpted volumes, and a refined theatricalization of the surrounding environment. Always hedonistic, and sometimes even pop on closer inspection, their architecture reflects contemporary practices, particularly those that shape public space, neighborhoods, promenades, and the sky.
Trained at the Paris Belleville School of Architecture, it is first along the French Riviera, and particularly in the Nice region where the firm is based, that Comte & Vollenweider’s architecture finds a distinctive expression—an antidote to land overconsumption and the standardization of built spaces, responding to the raw beauty of a coastal landscape of cliffs, rocks, and sandy hues. Behind the rigor of their production also lies a lineage with certain 20th-century Riviera heritage: heliotropic housing complexes in particular, with their human-scale grandeur, climate mastery, and culture of blurring the line between inside and outside. Opposites are reconciled, finding a vivid echo in the projects of Comte & Vollenweider.
There is therefore a sense of timelessness in their work, but also an urgency—driven by awareness of the impact of financialization on the beauty and habitability of both cities and rural areas, and by the need to confront the hazards of a climate intensified by ecosystem changes. There is also a determined pursuit of quality, dignity, frugality, and pleasure in architecture that, in Paris, Nice, Grenoble, or Annemasse, knows how to step aside for the obvious: use, always current, and landscape.
Across all the territories where the firm works, Comte & Vollenweider deconstruct localist stereotypes to offer inspiring architectural and urban solutions, responding both to site resources and societal challenges. Housing is a key field: at the interface between the intimate and the city, they explore spatial strategies that allow people to live and work, to find solitude while staying connected, to be urban while enjoying an interior landscape.
From the Cité Artisanale de Valbonne to the housing on Avenue de France, from the student residence in Cannes to the future Charenton-Bercy neighborhood, a diagonal emerges that exemplifies the diversity of expressions of a single response: pushing both precision and creativity to their limits. Buildings delivered 5, 10, or 15 years ago attest to the relevance of architecture serving dynamic territories, with Comte & Vollenweider working in the reality of the 21st-century Western city—its edges, interstices, wastelands, and ZACs.
In Paris, Nice, and beyond, Pierre-André Comte and Stéphane Vollenweider create spaces that repair, anticipate, and fulfill, always with confidence and never without lightness; always with precision and creativity.
Portfolio Comte et Vollenweider conveived by AHA ( Annabelle Hagmann, Angélique Pagnon)
