The term "living systems" implies a relationship and feedback loops between an individual and these systems. This theme covers research on biodiversity and nature-based solutions.
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.
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.
“ Capturing the conflict between the songs of nature and urban noise. ”
“ Capturing the conflict between the songs of nature and urban noise. ”
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.
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.
As part of the Paris Animal exhibition currently on show at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, the two curating architects, Léa Mosconi and Henri Bony, look back at the genesis of their project: to retrace the history that links animals to the capital’s urban fabric.
Landscape is not just a matter of shapes and colors. It also emanates from the sensitive perception of a sound environment, however urbanized it may be. This is what Sara el Samman defends in her diploma project, awarded by the Fédération Française du Paysage. Would La Défense be the same without the sound of heels on flagstones?
Botanist Serge Muller, a professor emeritus at the French National Museum of Natural History, is a specialist of “invasive alien species.” He discusses the concept of “nativeness” and lays out the contours of a policy opening cities to new tree species that could become important allies in coping with global warming. Based on an interview conducted in partnership with Coloco.
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.
To understand the living, you need to understand the invisible. This is what Véronique Mure, a botanist specializing in Mediterranean landscapes, is convinced of. By focusing on the relationship that people have with plants, she raises awareness on the importance of soil and roots and invites us to take care of them, like gardeners.
Virginie Maris is an environmental philosopher. In Nature à vendre – les limites des services écosystémiques (Nature for Sale – The Limits of Ecosystem Services), she questions the relevance of monetary valuation of services rendered by nature. You would never calculate how much your relationship brings you, so why do it with nature? Extract from the article Considering Separation Beyond Dualism, published in Stream 05: New Intelligences
Photographer Anne-Marie Filaire explores the transformations of the landscape. Since 2019, she has been documenting the sites accommodating the excavated soils from construction sites in the Grand Paris project, revealing the plastic and political dimensions of this “in-between” state of the landscape. Her work is currently be exhibited at the architecture and landscape biennale (BAP) in Versailles and the Hambourg Triennial of Photography.
“ A Canopy Plan to reduce urban heat islands. ”
“ A Canopy Plan to reduce urban heat islands. ”
Frédéric Ségur is the head of the Landscape and Urban Forestry department at Lyon metropolis. There, he is in charge of the Plan Canopée, and ensures that policy actions related to water, plants, and climate are aligned. He alerts us to the fact that we must reclaim the lost knowledge of urban plantations and tree care. READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Criticizing architecture’s anthropocentrism, Ariane Lourie Harrison expands on the concept of a post-human architecture, which she teaches at Yale. An interactive architecture thus arises, putting technology at the service of a “new nature” so that façades can provide refuge to birds and pollinators.
Pierre Kerrand is a nursery manager specializing in the cultivation of plants of the Tillandsia genus. These are specifically selected for better adaptation to our latitudes and to meet our needs. They produce colorful flowers and can withstand both drought and moisture, as well as variable temperatures. They require no maintenance and, most importantly, thrive without any need for soil and are very effective at remediating air pollution.
A specialist of the living, philosopher Emanuele Coccia imagines how architects could make the cohabitation between species possible without necessarily having to carry out an act of ecological repentance or abandoning modernity. A “building as a forest” and a city as a natural reserve are a few examples of the irruption of fantasy within the city.
The anthropologist and author of How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) recounts his Amazonian experience among the Runa people in order to convey to our Western minds the idea of a language that can go beyond words and symbols. A language that connects the beings of the forest, both human and non-human. A language that we seem to have forgotten…
The environmental crisis and the realization of the Anthropocene have fundamentally altered the way we relate to nature. Dissenting with the idea that nature is “dying” and opting for the idea of a generalized hybridity, Virginie Maris advocates keeping a separation—which she distinguishes from dualism—between man and nature, as a radical otherness worthy of attention, care, and respect. This vision of nature as the “wild part of the world,” free from human intentionality, helps put into perspective renaturation and rewilding processes, but also criticizes the notion of ecosystem services, in particular due to their dimension of commodification of nature and their contingency on an ideology of economic growth.
Kalina Raskin is the head of Ceebios, the Center for Studies and Expertise in Biomimicry. Her ambition is to accelerate the R&D in biomimicry in France and turn it into an efficient driver of the ecological transition, reconciling biodiversity, innovation, and the economy.
Marine Calmet is a lawyer specializing in environmental law. Her commitment to fight against the devastation inflicted on ecosystems and local populations by industrial actors has led her to co-found Wild Legal, a nonprofit/school that organizes moot courts simulating trials where nature would hold new rights.
Geochemist Jerôme Gaillardet is investigating the Earth’s “critical zone,” the very thin inhabitable layer where the interdependencies between the living and the non-living are at play. In order to understand how this complex system operates, we shouldn’t be splitting the sciences off from one another. For this reason, Jérôme is involved in the innovative approach of creating interdisciplinary observatories.
The questioning of the binary vision of the world proceeding from modernity, which set nature and culture apart, examines in great depth our relationship with the living and the place granted to it. If we are to overcome our anthropocentrism, how can we then assign a new status to nature in order to better preserve it? For Marine Calmet, this involves moving beyond our attitude of domination of the living and productivist logics of growth and to instead think in terms of commons and the protection of the living. With the forward-looking curriculum Wild Legal, she explores and imagines the creation of new legal tools based on concrete case studies, in particular around the concept of ecocide, to protect the environment and imagine types of governance that could help achieve a more harmonious articulation of the local and global scales.
As we are reconsidering our place as humans within nature, philosopher Emanuele Coccia investigates the natural phenomenon of metamorphosis and develops it into a philosophical concept that enables us to think about ourselves as part of a single breath of life that passes from one life form to another. Opposed to a penitential vision of environmentalism, he disagrees with the idea that the living should be viewed as fundamentally subsumed in the issue of ecological balances, life being a perpetual metamorphosis, poles apart from any notion of equilibrium. He champions the idea of a transformation of cities into “museums of contemporary nature” in order to overcome the conventional nature—culture divide and reinstate an urban interspecies approach focusing on cohabitation between all life forms and biodiversity.
Nature returns to the city, but can this new relationship with the living influence the very processes and materials of architecture? As early as the 1960s, the avant-gardes explored the ties between the intelligence of machines and that of the living, it is now possible to hybridize organic and synthetic materials, opening up an experimental field between biodesign and computer science, to create alternative biomaterials, as well as bio-inspired morphologies, in a symbiosis between the natural and artificial which is key to a more symbiotic relationship with our environment.
Increasing the place of plants in cities plays a key role in mitigating the urban heat island effect, but trees must be addressed as a systemic issue, interfacing with the air, the ground, and water. For Frédéric Ségur, we must re-engage with the knowledge of urban forestry in order to regain our intelligence of trees and counter the mistaken assumptions on their life expectancy in urban settings. Beyond political declarations, the idea is to plant well rather than simply a lot, and to provide adequate conditions for them to develop—including space and living soil—and to take into account the ecotypes, but also to get the plant palette to change in relation to climate change.
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!