This theme explores the sustainability issues raised by the Anthropocene at the scale of buildings and urban environments, in all their material aspects, from design and construction to the uses to which they are put.
22 April 2024
22 April 2024
For the past 3 years, PCA-STREAM has been publishing STREAM VOICES, the digital research and innovation magazine that explores the metabolic city. To share more generously the fruits of its collaborations and research, discover the new format, now published fortnightly! Contents of issue 1: — The art of artificial life” by visual artist Justine Emard — Paris at 50 degrees” by Alexandre Florentin, Paris councillor
17 April 2024
17 April 2024
The use of stone in construction declined during the 20th century. Today, its return is acclaimed for its qualities: inertia, durability, low-emission processing, local presence… with what techniques and applications in 2024? Introduction to the series by Elisabeth Bouchaud, materials physicist and playwright. With Cyril Pressacco, architect and co-founder of the Barrault Pressacco agency, Denis Macrez, artist, Ana Hedan, Director of Prescriptions at Rocamat and Paul Vergonjeanne, doctoral student in architecture.
“ 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? ”
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?
PCA-STREAM has won the competition for the extension of the Bobigny courthouse by designing a building with a balanced monumentality, reaffirming without excessive theatricality the sacredness of justice. The new courthouse will offer a functional and exemplary building, embodying the idea of a justice of care.
At the initiative of the Comité Grande-Armée, PCA-STREAM delivers "Grande-Armée 2030", a strategic vision for reintegrating the Avenue de la Grande-Armée into the urban dynamic of Paris's historic thoroughfare and adapting it to the challenges of the 21st century city.
Covivio, Hines France, and PCA-STREAM have come together to create the Stream Building, a manifesto building located at the heart of the new Clichy-Batignolles district that integrates almost fifteen years of research by Stream Lab into innovations addressing the key challenges facing the cities of tomorrow. Circular by design, the Stream Building is a relational and productive hub that will energize this new urban center within the Greater Paris area by concentrating all the activities associated with a vibrant urban life.
“ How are territories coping with reduced energy capacity? ”
“ How are territories coping with reduced energy capacity? ”
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.
The restructuring of 175 Boulevard Haussmann is an opportunity to become involved in making Paris a resilient and innovative city, one that is capable of renewing and reinventing itself. PCA-STREAM brings together two separate buildings to create a coherent office complex geared toward the well-being of its users and collaborative work. An emblematic contemporary rooftop addition, characterized by its glass scales, acts as a practical and symbolical connector between the various buildings and architectural periods involved.
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.
Located near the Saint-Lazare train station, these new-generation offices in a former military barracks combine the best of two architectural heritages. They offer a comfortable and prestigious workplace, turned towards nature and the well-being of its users, French law firm Gide-Loyrette-Nouel. The building's heritage is magnified and remodeled, enhancing its attractiveness and competitiveness, while helping to write a new page in the history of Paris's ever-changing urban fabric.
PCA-STREAM’s restructuring of 52 Champs-Élysées, the former Virgin Megastore, contributes to renewing the image and attractiveness of the Champs-Élysées. The imposing Streamline Modern Art Deco building gains new coherence thanks to a magnification of its architectural style and a clarification of its program. It will host a Galeries Lafayette department store, high-end offices, and an exceptional garden restaurant overlooking Paris.
In the heart of the Golden Triangle district, at 32–34 Rue Marbeuf, PCA-STREAM is reinventing the iconic Citroën dealership from the 1930s for Gecina, restored to its former glory with rejuvenated original architecture, innovative workspaces, and a full-fledged hanging garden on terraces that open out onto Paris.
At the heart of the Silicon Sentier, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, PCA-STREAM is restructuring an imposing postal building from the 1950s following an ambitious approach both in terms of heritage and the environment. Adaptive reuse has enabled the building to now offer flexible, comfortable, and innovative spaces, complemented by high-end services, as well as exceptional outdoor spaces.
In the heart of the revitalized Porte Maillot district, PCA-STREAM revisits the Parisian modernist heritage and extends the city-nature dialogue. The agency’s intervention respects and enhances the architectural qualities of the original structure. On the north side, the façade grid is reinterpreted in a contemporary style inspired by its original rigorous layout. Designed as a balcony overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, it highlights the exceptional linear nature of the building with unobstructed views of the greater Parisian panorama.The new headquarters of Murex, the world leader in software for the financial markets, was designed above all to maximize interaction and collective intelligence, an essential function of a head office that has been reinforced by the health crisis. Spaces are streamlined and legible, and fluid circulation is ensured by a core of elevators and Chambord staircases on the first day. Employees meet and exchange ideas in a place conducive to informal dialogue.
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 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!
With Ivry Confluences, located in a changing urban landscape featuring brownfield sites and eco-districts, PCA-STREAM is designing a symbol of the revitalization of the south end of Ivry-sur-Seine. In dialogue with the local industrial heritage, the studio reinterprets the morphology of railway halls to develop a new complex with exacting environmental standards. An exemplar of next-generation offices, Ivry Confluences takes an active part in adding to the vibrancy and diversity of the district thanks to its active base and an extensive garden that opens onto the city.
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.
The Canopy project in Pré-Saint-Gervais is a rehabilitation of a brownfield site in the inner suburbs of Paris that offers next-generation work spaces. This project was first conceived by PCA-STREAM in 2005 but took more than ten years to come into being. The original proposal, which was to transform a former industrial hall in a open plan of atypical and innovative offices for creative businesses, has weathered the subprime mortgage crisis is finally materializing now that a new vision of the workspace has gained in acceptance.
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.
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.
The merger of the four central arrondissements of the French capital, the beating heart of Parisian culture, is embodied in the new administrative hub set up around Square du Temple, with the Paris Centre Town Hall and Police Precinct. PCA-STREAM is adapting, restoring, and revitalizing the Hôtel de la Garantie, a heritage complex from the 1920s, in order to accommodate almost 600 police officers under new, enhanced working conditions.
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.
The former headquarters of the Telegraph, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, offered an exceptional building whose image had been gradually degraded by its successive occupants. PCA-STREAM revamped the site and reinvigorated this heritage property through the installation of new workspaces. An in situ artistic creation also reactivates its intimate links with the history of French telecommunications.
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.
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!