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“ What will Paris be like under 50°C? How can we postpone this scenario and be better prepared for it? ”
“ What will Paris be like under 50°C? How can we postpone this scenario and be better prepared for it? ”
Paris at 50°C
Our dense, mineral-rich capital is ill-suited to the extreme heat we’ll increasingly have to cope with. So what adaptation strategies can we implement? This is what we asked to Alexandre Florentin, Paris councillor responsible for resilience and climate issues. He chaired the “Paris at 50 degrees” mission, which delivered its report a few months ago: what fields of action for architects and urban designers?
The art of artificial life
Justine Emard is a visual artist. Her installations use AI to understand the living, exploring the boundaries between organic life and artificial intelligence. Bee swarms, encephalographic recordings and prehistoric paintings become learning supports for algorithms that, contrary to dystopian imaginations, generate new supra-hyper-organisms.
Artificial Intelligence in the creation process
AI is a new form of intelligence whose development is stirring up concerns and dystopian fables. Far from replacing human intelligence, AIs are emerging as new tools to be trained, controlled and shaped to achieve the desired result. For the artist, photographer, architect, film-maker, musician or illustrator, AIs become an agent with which to collaborate, resulting in co-creation. Inaugural lecture of the “AI and Creation” series at the Stream Innovation Center.
“ Bringing the artist back at the heart of the city. ”
“ Bringing the artist back at the heart of the city. ”
Story-telling as a meta skill
Claudia Ferrazzi, former government advisor on culture and audiovisual affairs, aims to put the artist back at the heart of the city by bringing together disciplines and industries. Founder of VIARTE, she uses art to support the implementation of new management methods. By adopting a narrative rather than a medium-based approach, she seeks to build bridges between the corporate world and artistic practice.
Which architecture for the ephemeral?
Eric Mangion has been director since 2006, after managing the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur from 1993 to 2005. His research has long been focused on the artistic gesture of disappearance – in all its forms, from the alteration of the work to the disappearance of the artist. At the Villa Arson, he develops a program around ephemeral practices. He develops here the link between his research topics – the disappearance, the ephemeral, in the art and more generally, in the culture – and the evolution of the architecture.
Exploring methodologies to understand the living city
Theoretical experiments around the concept of the “metabolic-city” place living organisms at the heart of a new paradigm, encouraging a systemic approach. In urban and architectural practice, what tools are available to measure metabolism? Pauline Detavernier, Doctor in Architecture and Research and Development Project Manager at PCA-STREAM, examines existing measures of the life cycle and urban metabolism to outline a methodology.
Experimenting with environmental art
Using scientific facts as artistic material, Dutch artist Thijs Biersterker seeks to emotionally connect the public to global questions, to inspire a desire to take action. He uses technology, in particular AI, as a medium. His immersive installations highlight the intelligence and communication systems of plants: thus creating a bridge between living beings.
Nose to nose with the world
Never once has Sissel Tolaas, Norwegian artist, chemist, linguist and researcher, uttered the word “perfume”. For the past twenty-five years, she has been collecting, inventing and breathing new life into smells, refusing to be part of the world’s aseptisation. Through her olfactory installations, she invites us to sense reality, its geography and its temporality. Most recently, she has recreated the smell of Pompeii, between sensory experience and memory of the past.
Looking at the city from a gender perspective
For feminist geographer Leslie Kern, the urban environment is not neutral and stems from norms and power dynamics. She calls for a greater variety of urban user needs to be examined, and for physicality to be reintroduced into urban design. This translates into spatial and social interventions around mixed use considerations and taking into account marginalised voices in decision-making processes.
“ How are territories coping with reduced energy capacity? ”
“ How are territories coping with reduced energy capacity? ”
Downscaling Energy
How are territories coping with reduced energy capacity? Five researchers presented their work at the Downscaling Energy study day organized at the agency by the Labex Futurs Urbains’ City and Energy working group. Research topics included Beirut, the impact of Hurricane Irma on the French island of Saint-Denis, resource management in the Middle Ages, the 1973 oil crash and the current environmental crisis.
“ What science fiction does to the city. ”
“ What science fiction does to the city. ”
"It will be upon a time", said science fiction to the city
Space is one of the great imaginary worlds of science fiction. By often depicting dystopian cities, authors sketch the contours of a desirable urbanity. Using science fiction as a field of investigation, Pierre-Antoine Marti, a PhD candidate in history at EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), uses representations of the future as a dataset for prospective reflection on the interplay between science fiction and innovation.
“ Capturing the conflict between the songs of nature and urban noise. ”
“ Capturing the conflict between the songs of nature and urban noise. ”
The melody of the living
Frédéric Jiguet is an ornithologist and professor at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. In particular, he leads the STOC program: Suivi Temporel des Oiseaux Communs (Temporal Monitoring of Common Birds), which aims to understand the impacts of global change and the consequences of human activities on birds. We met him in situ, capturing the conflict between nature’s songs and urban noise.
Displaced villages, uprooted populations
Moussa Belkacem is a PhD candidate in architecture at the OCS (Observatory of the Suburban Condition) laboratory of the Paris-Est Architecture, Cities & Territories School. His work focuses on the displacement of villages in Europe between 1945 and 2045. He examines projects to relocate urban areas that are bound to be destroyed, and stresses the need to consider the links between demolition and reconstruction, in order to better accompany these uprootings.
Vulnerability as an inclusive principle
Emma Vilarem has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, specialising in the study of social interactions. Co-founder of [S]CITY, she helps city planners integrate the psychological, emotional and social needs of residents into their projects. If the urban environment affects our brains and behaviors, couldn’t paying attention to the most vulnerable inhabitants improve the overall experience of the city?
EYES ON THE STREET 01
We have never collected so much data in cities. The public space is thus subjected to a real “dataification”. But how can we explain this massive capture? What is it about? And what does it tell us about our time? An inaugural lecture by Olivier Aïm, lecturer at Sorbonne University and author of Les Théories de la Surveillance, followed by an afterwork co-organized with Yourban, The Swarm Initative and The Good AI.
Spotlight on the city
Hervé Bougon is a film programmer and co-founder of Close-Up, a film festival dedicated to architecture, cities and landscapes. Close Up uses fiction to question the way we live, and year after year continues its work of discovering and raising awareness of major urban issues by bringing to the screen representations of urban architectural culture.
STREAM : a research opus founded 14 years ago
Stream is a transdisciplinary magazine founded by Philippe Chiambaretta in 2009. By bringing together philosophers, sociologists, artists, engineers, biologists, economists and architects, it crystallizes a kaleidoscopic, forward-looking vision of the urban issues it tackles. It’s a way of doing research, by confronting expertise, at the crossroads of knowledge!
Applying a research approach in an architectural practice
Etienne Riot, urban planning researcher, and Pauline Detavernier, architecture researcher, are at the heart of applied research and innovation at PCA-STREAM. Together, they talk about the different facets of this research, from a CIFRE contract, to the setting up of a university chair project, to the subjects explored by the collaborators.
Establishing regenerative synergies
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!
The client and the architect
Bertrand Julien-Laferrière, former CIO of the Société Foncière Lyonnaise, collaborated with PCA-STREAM on the design of #cloud.paris. This building, located in the heart of Paris, combines work spaces that coincides with the aspirations of the creative classes and the employees of high value-added industries, which are turning away from the single-use business centers of the periphery. As part of the documentary “PCA-STREAM: From research to action”, we asked him to reconsider the development of this project. Here, he goes into more detail about the relationship between the client and the architect in the French context.
An overview of architectural research
In 2017, on the occasion of the Lyon Biennale d’Architecture “Processus & Pratiques”, Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, architectural historian and professor at the Collège de France, reviewed the evolution of architectural research from the early 20th century to the present day, when the profession is being redefined by the acquisition of an analytical as well as a project-based function.
Piloting the "City-Metabolism" Chair
Périg Pitrou is an anthropologist, CNRS Research Director at the Maison Française d’Oxford and head of the “Anthropology of Life” team at the Collège de France. He is Scientific Director of the City-Metabolism Chair, which links the agency with PSL University (Paris Sciences et Lettres). The aim: to identify how interdisciplinary collaborations can help overcome the challenges of building future urban worlds.
Harnessing AI as an architect
The researcher and data scientist explores and experiments with how architects can use artificial intelligence to enhance their practice. A foretaste of the AI & Creation conference series, for which he will host the fourth session (11/20/23), accompanied by American architects Daniel Bolojan and Andrew Witt.
“ Building cities, deconstructing methods. ”
“ Building cities, deconstructing methods. ”
Building cities, deconstructing methods
Through the act of building, architect, experimenter and 2019 Grand Prix de l’urbanisme Patrick Bouchain questions public commissioning and puts it to the test of reality. His comments echo those of Philippe Chiambaretta in Faire la ville autrement, recently published by Flammarion.