The association La Table Ronde de l’Architecture, a longstanding partner of INTBAU, is restoring a 17th-century farmhouse in Alsace, France, with the ambition of transforming it into a pioneering school of architecture and building crafts.

More than an educational institution, this initiative seeks to create a place for living, learning, and collegial exchange—bringing together people of all backgrounds, ages, and cultures around a shared purpose: to relearn and transmit the age-old traditions of a beautiful, durable, and deeply humane architecture.

The problem addressed

The project responds to a wider challenge in today’s built environment. As described by founders Nadia Everard and Noe Morin, architecture has increasingly become a short-term investment product—driven by industrial materials and homogeneous design, often disconnected from local heritage and context.

At its root lies a gap in contemporary education. Traditional building, architecture, and urbanism are taught in only a minority of architecture schools worldwide. In response, the INTBAU Network and its partners deliver each year education programmes globally, offering immersive experiences in traditional architecture, building, and urbanism.

In 2025, INTBAU-affiliated programmes took place in the US, Italy, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Mexico, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, Qatar, Romania, Austria, and Brazil, with applications for this year’s programmes currently underway.

Since 2021, La Table Ronde de l’Architecture has already been contributing to this effort through its summer schools in Bruges and Alsace dedicated to traditional architecture and building crafts.

The new school will expand this vision, teaching the use of time-tested materials and techniques—such as hemp, cork, earth, and straw—alongside skills in joinery, timber structures, and gardening, all rooted in local climate and context.

By restoring this knowledge to the heart of architectural education, the initiative aims to reconnect architects and craftspeople, fostering new, shared opportunities for carpenters, masons, stone carvers, roofers, joiners, brickmakers, thatchers, blacksmiths, lime burners, sculptors, and more.

A school of builders

The association highlights that the school in Alsace will not train architects in the academic sense, but builders. Students will receive both:

• theoretical courses (drawing, geometry, construction, history, and philosophy),
• and practical training (masonry, carpentry, stone cutting, joinery, lime and earth plastering, cob, ceramics, engraving, and painting).

Located in a 17th-century Alsatian farmhouse in the village of Westhoffen (Bas-Rhin, France), the buildings themselves will be the first object of study. The restoration and transformation of the farm, with the help of students through hands-on workshop projects, will put teaching into practice. Students will learn by building their school, stone by stone.

Once fully transformed, the school will include several classrooms and drawing studios, a library, workshops for stone cutting, masonry, carpentry, joinery, ceramics, stone engraving, and decorative arts, a “student house” with bedrooms, bathrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen and community café open to the public, serving as a meeting place for students, craftspeople, and local residents.

How can you help La Table Ronde build Europe’s first School of Architecture & Crafts?

Support the campaign and contribute to the creation of a new reference for education in traditional architecture and building crafts.

All funds raised will cover:

• The start of the initial restoration and conversion work,
• the purchase of materials and tools,
• the payment of master craftsmen who will lead the training workshops,
• and the hiring of craftsmen for work that cannot be carried out by students for safety or technical reasons.