Simon Barthelemy, born in France in 1980, studied architecture in Paris and worked as a project manager in Nicolas Michelin & Associés and Moreau Kusunoki. He started his own practice as a co-founder of NOVO architectures in 2016.
NOVO operates in the fields of architecture, design, and scenography. NOVO, a name to mean that each project is a territory to be explored and a world to be built: it will be the field of a reflection each time renewed. Its starting point could be a place, a material, a heritage, a human community. Its approach will be both intuitive and discursive.
Attention to the material in its most elementary form, the intimate relationship of the constructed object to nature, or the arrangement of simple geometries, are nevertheless recurring themes common to all the projects imagined by the office. That approach is relevant regardless of the scale of the project. It justifies the equal concern for NOVO to work on furniture, a house, or a neighborhood, in a desire to maintain continuity from the individual to the community.
Iliana Genova, born in Bulgaria in 1981, studied architecture in Paris and worked in X-TU architects and Nicolas Michelin & Associés.