Paul Hardy, an architect and designer based in Pantin, France, develops a singular practice at the crossroads of architecture, visual arts, and design.

His work explores furniture not only as a functional or aesthetic presence, but as a witness to lived experience, a silent archive of gestures, wear, and interaction. In resonance with the memory embedded in objects, he seeks to reconfigure materials that already carry a history: sand, ashes, formwork wood, industrial glass, metal. Materials designed to build, to disappear, to support, but here redirected to become visible, tactile, and carriers of form.

Beyond reclaiming, Paul Hardy goes further by fabricating his own matter from industrial by-products: fly ash from power plants, crushed rubble from construction sites, pigments, silicate binders. These mixtures generate new mineral composites that condense both the memory of their origin and the possibility of another life. Each fragment, each density or flaw, guides the gesture and shapes the form, creating objects that are at once structural and sensitive.

His practice is built on tension: between architectural precision and instinctive making, between technical assembly and organic vibration. Surfaces crack, vibrate, mark, as if the material itself were speaking again. The objects that emerge do not conceal irregularities; instead, they reveal the traces of use, the memory of both their former function and their transformation.

His work is also nourished by a fascination with the mineral world and geological formations, explored through travel and site visits. These experiences inspire his creations with emotional depth and visual density. Each piece becomes a form of visual cartography, a fragment of territory reimagined by the hand.

Through this approach, his pieces embody both continuity and rupture: they extend the echoes of past uses while proposing new ways to inhabit materiality. At once functional and sculptural, they position design as a space where matter, memory, and gesture enter into dialogue.