I’m Azouz Manachou, an architectural designer, researcher, and urban theorist. I see design as a dialogue between people and their environment. Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin gives words to something I feel deeply. I can forget a room’s proportions and still remember the cool air at its threshold or the way my footsteps sounded inside. That’s how I think about spatial articulation, through the way a place unfolds as I move through it.

Living in Tunisia and Canada made belonging a personal question for me. I carried that question into my Master of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy helps me think about what spaces become as people make them their own. In my book, Berlin Manifesto: Culture Against Capital, I explore how Berlin’s squatting movements turned vacant buildings into places to live, make art, and organize.

I draw to give form to places I can only imagine. Two of my drawings inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities were among the 100 finalists in Architizer’s 2021 One Drawing Challenge. One was also shortlisted in the Hybrid–Student category of the Architecture Drawing Prize at the World Architecture Festival.

I believe good design belongs to everyone. I want to make places where people feel welcome to stay and have a say in what those places become.