Baptiste Manet

Born in the south of France and based in Paris, Baptiste Manet is an architect specialising in the field of contemporary heritage, an activist teacher, and the founder and director of publication of the independent publishing house Cosa Mentale. Since the beginning of his training, he has always tried to maintain, parallel to the exercise of his profession as an architect, a reflective activity engaged in writing or setting up various projects around architectural criticism and the question of its transmission and diffusion.

In 2009, he founded the magazine Cosa Mentale-Carnets d’Architecture et de Résistance, which became Editions Cosa Mentale in 2015. Cosa Mentale is a collective European editorial project, independent and militant, which promotes an approach to architecture as a discipline of reflection and thought that can be read and discussed as much as it is designed and built. It is a space for sharing and diffusing ideas and knowledge through literary and pictorial creation. Éditions Cosa Mentale tries to be a resistant and creative voice, and it produces magazines, books, conferences and exhibitions on a voluntary basis, all of which are fragments of a collective construction that is transversal to reflection.

In 2018, after six years of experience as project manager at the Pierre Louis Faloci Architecture and Landscape Studio, Grand Prix d’architecture 2019, Baptiste Manet created the Sapiens architecture studio with his partner Yann Legouis. Sapiens enthusiastically takes up the dual economic and ecological challenge of our generation: to do better and with less. Sapiens attempts to question the multiple potentialities of architecture and to reformulate the question of production. Production from the material, from experimentation, from manufacturing, from construction. Production resulting from criticism, thought, reflection and exchange.