Philosopher, professor at the National School of Architecture of Paris-La Villette and at the Special School of Architecture, she directs the Gerphau laboratory and the PhiLAU international network. Silver Medal of the Academy of Architecture in 2005, she is chevalier de la Légion d’honneur since 2014, co-founder and member of ARENA (Architectural Research Network) and the magazine "L'esprit des villes". Through her publications and research, she creates bridges between architecture and philosophy to address the issue of living and relationships between nature and artifact.
Philosopher, researcher and architecture school teacher Chris Younès advocates the implementation of “regenerative synergies” to learn to collaborate, respect the dynamics of nature and seek a new form of harmony – not simply aesthetic but also ethical and political – to improve the manufacture of inhabited environments. An attitude advocated by many architectural researchers!
Philosopher and architecture school faculty member Chris Younès advocates implementing “regenerative synergies” so that “building” can stop going hand in hand with “destroying.” We need to learn to collaborate and observe the dynamics of nature, but also work towards a new form of harmony—not only in esthetic, but also in ethical and political terms—in order to improve the construction of inhabited environments.
As the living increasingly emerges as the conceptual horizon of urban production, philosopher Chris Younès analyses the dynamics of an architecture of environments. Whether biotope or architecture, environments are the product of the interactions that constitute them and continuously transform them. Considering environments in this way allows us to emphasize “the in-between,” with every metabolism being both self-organized and porous, operating within a system of relationships. In this way, it insists upon the fecundity of the “reliances” that exist between city and nature as the condition for a symbolic reestablishment of urban environments through an increased coexistence with nature. Developing urban environments’ capacities for resilience requires that we no longer step outside of our environment, as modern thinking would encourage, but rather drives us to understand and establish alliances with the environment, with the goal of revealing, managing, and revitalizing it. In this way, we will see the reemergence of new ways of thinking and doing, in order to “renature” both architecture and the city.
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.
Explore More
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!