History & Values

History

I believe it all started with a discomfort. Not a revelation, a discomfort, a persistent one, that settled in during my years at the Communauté Urbaine de Douala. I was head of the urban planning department there. A serious job, a useful one even. But I spent my days processing files, enforcing regulations, without ever really building anything resembling what I had learned in Paris, at the École de Tolbiac, or what I had seen at Chabrol's, where I took my first steps as a young architect.

I had trained to design places. I found myself managing procedures.

It took time for me to understand something simple, almost banal: an architect can only truly thrive by working with private clients. In administration, you manage what already exists. In private practice, you propose, you discuss, you convince — and sometimes, you actually build what you imagined. It was that difference that led me, in 1995, to leave a stable position to found my own firm in Douala.

I didn't have a ten-year plan. I had a conviction, more modest than it might seem: that the architecture we were taught, largely conceived elsewhere, could not simply be applied as-is to our cities, our climate, our ways of life. It had to be translated. Not copied, and not rejected on principle either — translated, using what we had on hand: our materials, our light, our habits, our cultural heritage.

C.A.I.U. meant that from the start: Cabinet Architecture Ingénierie Urbanisme. The three disciplines together, because I never believed you could do one well without the other two. A building poorly integrated into its urban fabric, or poorly conceived technically, remains a bad building, even if it looks good on paper.

The beginnings were nothing extraordinary. Little money, few clients, a lot of time spent convincing people that a Cameroonian firm could carry ambitious projects, not just house extensions. It took years for that to really change — the first competitions won, OHADA, then SODECOTON, ASAC, MINHDU. Each project won through a tender legitimized that original idea a little more: that we could produce rigorous, demanding architecture without giving up who we are.

Looking back today, I wouldn't say I had a vision in the grand sense of the word. I mainly refused to keep doing work that didn't feel like mine. The rest — the honors, the recognition — came afterward, as a consequence, never as a goal. What still matters, thirty years on, is that same question we ask ourselves on every new project: does this building truly respond to the people who will live, work, or simply pass through it?