Yona Friedman has been destabilizing the architectural world since the 1950s. He is a pioneer of prospective architecture, renowned for his self-planning principles, mobile architecture and interest in local construction methods. Preferring the construction process , the "inhabitant" to the architecture and the structure, he is at the origin of the manifesto La ville spatiale which proposes an infrastructure that would be a spine for new spaces of sociability. Cells can be grafted, developed collectively and adaptable to the needs, uses and changes of the environment. These precepts still serve as a model for the invention of a "crisis architecture" many years later.
Yona Friedman granted us one of his last interviews before passing away in December 2019. In this unpublished video, he questions centralization and urban density and envisions the future as the establishment of a diffuse “global city,” a position that resonates deeply in the present context.
A historical figure of prospective architecture, Yona Friedman describes the importance of the model of communication embodied by the living organism, a source of inspiration for an architecture for living beings rather than a living entity in itself. He looks back at technological developments in the field of communications, that allow us to do away with the classical urban imperative of proximity, and also looks back at the liberation of the individual with respect to networks, that still represented an obstacle when he was imagining the concept of “mobile architecture” in the fifties. Urban proximity has evolved to the point where it has transformed Europe into an urban continent, with different metropolises becoming one single and unique city, materialized by the TGV, the batteries and the cellphone of utopias of the nineteen sixties. Friedman continues to defend a “mobile architecture”, that anyone can adapt, while not denying the advisory role of the architect. He also struggles against urban density, advocating that a dilution of the city would allow nature to find its place – returning alimentary independence to urban spaces, according to spatialities that remain to be invented by the population itself, in a continuation of his pioneering work on self planning. Text resulting from an interview with Philippe Chiambaretta and Gilles Coudert, in Yona Friedman’s apartment-workshop on September 21st, 2017, with the assitance of the Jérôme Poggi Gallery.
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!