Stand on the Place Grande Poste in Algiers on any morning and look up. The building that occupies the northwest corner of the square is one of the most astonishing objects in North Africa — a 1910 Moorish revival post office with a white stone facade, horseshoe arches, muqarnas ceilings, and a minaret-inspired central tower that rises above the surrounding Haussmann-era blocks like an argument from another century.
It is slowly disappearing. Not dramatically, not all at once, but in the way that stone buildings in Mediterranean climates disappear: a carved capital crumbles and is replaced with painted concrete; a muqarnas cell falls and is filled with smooth plaster; a balustrade cracks and is replaced with iron pipe. Each substitution is small. The cumulative effect, over decades, is the loss of the thing that made the building extraordinary.
This is the problem I spent my final year at EPAU trying to solve. My thesis question was: what if the same technology printing jet engine parts could print 1905 Moorish ornament?
"What if the same technology printing jet engine parts could print 1905 Moorish ornament? The answer changed how I think about preservation — and about what it means to build something that lasts."— N. Bouteraa
The heritage paradox
Architectural heritage conservation faces a paradox that the discipline has never fully resolved. The purpose of conservation is authenticity — preserving the original material, the original craftsmanship, the original intention. But original craftspeople are dead, original materials are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, and original techniques require years of training that almost nobody has.
The standard response is a hierarchy of interventions: first do nothing; then consolidate; then restore with matching materials; only replace when absolutely necessary, and when you do, make the repair legible — distinguishable from the original so that future generations can read the history of the building's interventions.
This is a sound principle. It is also, in the context of a building like the Grande Poste, insufficient. The ornamental program of a Moorish revival building is not incidental decoration — it is the building's primary argument. The horseshoe arch is not just a shape; it is a reference, a claim about identity and tradition and the relationship between Algeria and the civilisations that preceded the colonial period. When that ornament disappears, the argument disappears with it.
What additive manufacturing changes
Additive manufacturing — 3D printing, in its most general form — was being used in aerospace and medical applications when I was writing my thesis. The precision achieved by selective laser sintering and direct metal laser sintering was extraordinary: tolerances of less than a millimetre over objects of considerable complexity. Turbine blades. Femur implants. Objects whose geometry no traditional manufacturing method could produce at acceptable quality and cost.
The ornamental elements of the Grande Poste are, from a manufacturing standpoint, less complex than a turbine blade. They are intricate, but their intricate is geometrically regular — Moorish ornament is governed by mathematical systems, by the geometry of the circle and its subdivisions, that are as precisely specifiable as any engineering drawing. A muqarnas cell is not a free-form object. It is a highly constrained parametric family.
My thesis asked: what would happen if you scanned the surviving elements of the Grande Poste's ornamental program, built a parametric library from the geometric rules governing their design, and used that library to generate replacement elements that could be printed in stone-substitute materials indistinguishable from the originals?
Photogrammetric scanning of surviving ornamental elements generates point clouds accurate to sub-millimetre tolerance. From these, parametric models can be derived that capture the geometric rules of the ornamental system rather than just the surface of a single element. Those models can generate replacement elements at any scale, in any material, with any degree of weathering simulation. The result is not a replica — it is a continuation of the original logic.
What the thesis changed in me
I did not expect the thesis to change how I think about business. But it did. The process of working on it taught me something about the relationship between the logic of a thing and the instances of that logic that I have used constantly since.
The Grande Poste's ornament is valuable not because of any specific carved stone. The specific carved stones are replaceable — that was the whole point of the thesis. What is irreplaceable is the geometric logic that generated those stones: the system of relationships, the parametric rules, the underlying pattern that can produce any particular instance.
This is exactly how I think about FnarGroup and the ventures it generates. Each venture — Immotify, Sanad, ARIIS — is an instance of an underlying logic. The logic is: Algeria's real estate and financial ecosystem needs infrastructure layers, and those layers can be built by someone who understands the market from inside it. Each venture is generated from that logic the way each muqarnas cell is generated from the geometric rules of the ornamental system. The ventures themselves are replaceable — they will change, adapt, be succeeded by better versions. The logic is the thing.
On preservation and progress
There is a version of this argument that reads as conservative — as a defence of the past against the present. That is not what I intend.
The Grande Poste is a 1910 building designed by Jules Voinot in a style that synthesized French academic classicism with North African Islamic tradition. It was built by a colonial administration as part of a project to legitimize its presence in Algiers by appearing to honor local culture. The politics of this are complicated and worth examining. The building itself is extraordinary.
Preservation is not about freezing the past. It is about carrying forward what is worth carrying — the ornamental logic, the spatial intelligence, the geometric sophistication — into a present that can use it. Algeria's architectural heritage is one of the most complex and layered in the Mediterranean: Berber, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, French. Every layer is worth understanding. None of them are frozen.
ARIIS exists, in part, because of this conviction. The summit began with a question about how Algeria's built environment could be governed intelligently — how the decisions being made now, about what to build and how to build it, could be made with an understanding of the tradition they are entering. A tradition that includes the Grande Poste, the Casbah, the Roman ruins at Timgad, the Ottoman palaces of Algiers, and everything built since.
The Grande Poste taught me that technology and heritage are not opposites. That the most sophisticated digital manufacturing techniques are, in the right hands, instruments of continuity. That understanding the logic of something — its generative rules, its structural argument — is the only way to extend it faithfully into the future.
That is the lesson I have tried to apply everywhere since.