Catherine Mosbach is DPLG landscaper. After a career in biology, physics and chemistry at the Université de Strasbourg Louis Pasteur, she joined the Nationale Supérieur de Paysage de Versailles, where she follows the teaching of Michel Corajoud. Upon leaving school, she created the magazine Pages Paysages with Marc Claramunt, Vincent Tricaud and Pascale Jacotot. To answer to a commission from the Ministry of the Environment on the representation of the Vauban landscape-relief landscape, she is doing a DEA in History and Civilization at EHESS. Her practice reveals a taste for the experimental in the broad sense. Her emblematic projects include the Bordeaux Botanical Garden, the Louvre Lens Park and Gateway Park in Taiwan.
How can we create a dialogue between architecture and landscape? In this interview, the landscaper Catherine Mosbach details how her work of representing natural environments abolishes the distance between the public and the object observed.
How can we move beyond man’s position of dominance over nature? In what way can the living be articulated so as to improve the city? How can we create a dialogue between architecture and landscape? The work of the landscaper Catherine Mosbach represents natural environments—through the recomposition of layers of landscape—collapsing any distance between the public and the object being observed. She recreates environments in the city by playing with a set of parameters including plants but also topography, hygrometry, soils, and environmental pollution, in such a way as to counterbalance urban extremes and create islands of coolness and comfort, but also to provide paths and spaces for sociability. Within this approach, landscape and technology become complementary levers. The landscaper’s drawing must allow the hosting of events by giving up full control. In a similar fashion, architecture can no longer be so attached to the monumental envelope—form and frontier—so as to provide refined interfaces with the landscape, create porosities, and welcome transitions between the inside and the outside.
Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
Researcher and data scientist Stanislas Chaillou investigates how AI can enable architects to support and enhance their practice. A small sampler of a new book published by Éditions du Moniteur in March 2021.
François Taddei is a geneticist and co-founder, with Ariel Lindner, of the Learning Planet Institute (formerly known as CRI). Conceived as a school for the 21st century, the institute combines artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to reinvent ways of learning, teaching and doing research.
Hubert Beroche is the founder of the Urban AI think tank, dedicated to the field of urban artificial intelligence. He is the curator of the Eyes on the street lecture series, run together in partnership with the SCAI (Sorbonne Center for Artifical Intelligence), and explains here how urban AI can help us understand the city.
Contemporary architectural research is often fascinated by biological life but with an approach that goes beyond simple organic metaphors thanks to recent technological developments. Alisa Andrasek discusses the link between biology and her architectural practice, and her interest in the distribution of information in natural processes—a complexity that she tries to approach via big data. Her work in computational design is influenced by the convergence between information and materials, in an increasingly complex and open synthesis which enables it to go beyond the production of form and address the dynamic processes of matter itself. Alisa Andrasek is an architect, director and founder of the Biothing laboratory. She teaches at the Architectural Association of London.
Researcher Claire Lesieur works at the CNRS Ampère Laboratory on the Go Pro project, which applies a computational model developed for protein folding to urban environments. The shape-changing properties of proteins are put to use in an attempt to map out the opportunities for urban growth that don’t involve urban sprawl.
In the face of the promises of the prophets of artificial intelligence and the marketing of those major economic players promoting the smart city as a solution to urban ills, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille remind us of the irreducible materiality and fragility of cities. Demystifying what they perceive as a form of “neopositivism” of data, they point out that data doesn’t exist per se, and in fact must be generated and then maintained at a significant cost. As a result, data is never neutral and takes on a fundamentally political dimension. Understanding this framework leads them to promote a paradigm of maintenance and fragility, instead of the more common one of sustainability and resilience, when approaching urban realities.
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Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!