Gilles Clément is a landscaper, gardener and author. He deeply questions the way in which man enslaves nature, treats it to its aesthetic tastes and tries to rationalize its functioning to meet its most immediate needs. He denounces our ignorance of the interactions in between living beings, which leads us to a fatal impoverishment of biodiversity.
He supports the idea that the principle of precedence of the living should condition every landscaping project – and more broadly, all town and country planning projects.
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In this interview filmed at the AIA Architecture Centre in New York, Michael Speaks, Dean of the School of Architecture of Syracuse, talks about the Design Energy Futures program that focuses on low-carbon planning and products. It aims to analyse datas in order to conceive scenarios of plausible futures and thus offer a better planification for urban expansion.
Building the city of the Anthropocene era requires taking global environmental issues into account, while also considering all living beings in the actual construction of the buildings. Criticizing the anthropocentrism of architects, Ariane Lourie-Harisson has developed the concept of a “post-human” architect, intended for different species. She advocates an exploration of the possibilities of building according to a wider vision of forms of life that are concerned by the building, redefining the relationships of man with animals and the non-human in general. Thus, an interactive form of architecture is born, in particular with regard to facades, that can — with the help of textured concrete for example — host pollinators or provide nesting spaces in their rugged surfaces. This presupposes a better understanding of the living and of being open to different environmental theories, in such a way as to favor the creation of urban relays for biodiversity, in particular on roofs. Ariane Lourie Harrison is an architect and professor at Yale School of Architecture
Pierre Musso is a philosopher, PhD in political sciences, professor of information and communication sciences at Télécom ParisTech and at the University of Rennes. He is specialized in philosophy of the imaginary, particularly in relation to new technologies and urban planning. This talk is an introduction to these concepts and their influence on the work of those who design the city.