New uses
The "new uses" refer to contemporary societal evolutions: platform economy, work atomization, family recomposition, new mobility, technology and work, new consumer patterns... They are embodied in new programmatic standards (shared spaces, concierges, co-living, co-working, etc.).
“ 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.
La Source Vive is a new concert hall dedicated to chamber music located in Évian. The result of a collaboration between architects Patrick Bouchain and Philippe Chiambaretta. Its conch-like form is the outcome of sensory experimentation and scientific analysis aimed at achieving exceptional acoustics while blending seamlessly into its scenic surroundings. The project is housed by the Évian Resort and embodies Aline Foriel-Destezet’s commitment to promoting music. Born of her desire to support the creation of an architectural complex featuring a unique concert hall in service of a major music project, La Source Vive will be located at the Mélèzes site, in the close vicinity of La Grange au Lac, another iconic music venue designed thirty years ago by Patrick Bouchain. Together, they will form an exceptional architectural complex dedicated to music—two complementary facilities within the same institution working together to provide a complete, open, and supportive musical experience.
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.
PCA-STREAM was tasked by Groupama to design an innovative tower that will renew the image of La Défense. Revisiting the model of the traditional tower, The Link is emblematic of the transformation of working practices and a new relation to the city. Its morphology in two wings connected to one another with platforms called “links” allows the tower to provide spaces that foster interactions and collective intelligence, and gives an unprecedented place to nature in a high-rise building.
At emlyon’s upcoming Gerland campus, which is slated to welcome its inaugural students in 2024, we’ve arranged the buildings around a spacious interior street and a spectacular central hub—Cœur Battant, the “beating heart” of the campus—where daily activities and key school events will converge. Every element is designed to foster interaction, serendipity, and collective intelligence. The campus opens itself up to the city, as well as to businesses and events. It is fully aligned with the environmental dynamics of the Gerland District as well, with its extensive garden and commonsense approach to sustainability, exemplified by its uncomplicated and efficient facades adorned with terraces and inviting outdoor walkways.
At 175 Haussmann, PCA-STREAM brought together two buildings to create a new cutting-edge office complex, completed by an emblematic contemporary extension, to house the headquarters of the Lazard bank. The interior design team created the public and reception areas, using hospitality codes and a combination of openness and confidentiality.
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?
At the heart of the Stream Building, PCA-STREAM's flagship project, the agency's interior architecture department has created the Stream Café, a reception area with hybrid uses that symbolizes the involvement of the Stream research program in the design of this unique complex, winner of the first Réinventer Paris call for innovative urban projects.
ShAKe offers the Euralille district an atypical and convivial silhouette, with a spiraling planted promenade topped by a belvedere. PCA-STREAM is rethinking the office building, opening it up to the city and its residents, to adapt to the changing face of an increasingly open-plan working world. The form of the building-promenade is an invitation to live and share.
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.
#cloud.paris stems from PCA-STREAM’s research and Société Foncière Lyonnaise’s ambitions. In the time and age of the intangible economy, its inner city location and its versatility 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. Following heavy restructuring, this urban campus was designed as a relational ecosystem where the collective experience stimulates innovation and productivity.
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!
PCA-STREAM has designed an energy-positive office building in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a service sector cluster that is undergoing major transformation. We were driven to revisit the form of a tripod by the specific nature of the plot and our ambition for environmental excellence. This bold morphology opens the building on the city by freeing up green areas, and it optimizes the energy footprint whilst providing a functional work environment that is focused on improving the well-being of its users.
PCA-STREAM takes its inspiration from its research on new workspaces, which are gathered in the second issue of the Stream book-magazine, “After Office,” in order to design its premises in the Marais, on the site of a former printing house. Designed as an ecosystem that brings together a variety of spaces for the use of a large multidisciplinary team, this place is the spatial embodiment of PCA-STREAM as well as a manifesto of its innovative vision of the work space.
“ What Leboncoin tells us about urban exodus. ”
“ What Leboncoin tells us about urban exodus. ”
What Leboncoin tells us about urban exodus
Alexandre Coulondre is a data and real estate market specialist and researcher at Lab’Urba (Gustave Eiffel University). To analyze the phenomena of urban exodus, he collaborated with Leboncoin, the french small ads platform, which provided him with the data needed to study local migration. A podcast to listen to, to question some of the much-mediatized theories according to which, in the wake of the pandemic, many city dwellers have left the metropolises!
PCA-STREAM's interior design department completed the architectural restructuring of a 1960s-era office complex with a tailor-made layout of offices and common areas for the lessee, a major luxury brand. Comfortable and functional, the project develops a high-end image through the quality of the materials, which are handcrafted.
True to its urban vision of a sustainable, desirable, and inclusive city, PCA-STREAM is involved in Café Joyeux’s vocational center for the rehabilitation of people with mental and cognitive disabilities on the Champs-Élysées. As part of this solidarity-based partnership, the studio has designed a pop-up venue on the “world’s most beautiful avenue”, showcasing its staff’s capacity to provide quality service. The interior space, which is adapted to the special needs of its staff, has a welcoming and colorful atmosphere, providing a warm and friendly venue. On the walls, Café Joyeux’s adventure is displayed, while the prep space is open to the public in order for all the staff to be made visible, as this is not just a place of meeting and interaction, but also an awareness-raising project.
As part of the Eurodisney development zone, PCA-STREAM is designing a mixed-use, open-plan tertiary campus, co-designed with its user, Crédit Agricole Brie-Picardie. It embodies the traditional values of this bank, its environmental, social and cultural commitments, but also its commitment to the uses of tomorrow.
PCA-STREAM designed and completed a commercial and leisure center destined to become a new urban centrality in the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport area. Aéroville is inspired by the travel imaginary and diverts the codes of the international flagship store. It is a public space that hybridizes the codes of the airport with those of mixed-use activities of an urban center. Built in less than four years of studies and construction, it was delivered to the client, Unibail-Rodamco, in October 2013.
Co-creating a learning society
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.
Designing Soundscapes
Nadine Schütz is a sound architect. She lends a new dimension to urban landscapes thanks to sound installations and work on the acoustic environment. In this way, she highlights the role of sound in the sensory relationship of humans to their surroundings and in raising environmental awareness.
Design with care, interview with Antoine Fenoglio and Cynthia Fleury
The encounter between philosopher Cynthia Fleury and designer Antoine Fenoglio offers an example of crossing practices around the idea of design with care, which allows a “design with purpose” based on the idea that fragility favors in a systemic way the practice towards environmental and social issues. With the concept of proof of care, experimentation itself becomes a form of care that leads to a reflection on modes of governance. Designers become integrators, diplomats between expertises, relying on their know-how in representation and prototyping.
A "third place" research lab
Diego Landivar is a lecturer and researcher in economics and the founder of the Origens Media Lab, a “third place” research lab developed to address critical situations. More flexible and responsive than conventional research laboratories, Origens focuses on the far-reaching transformations brought about by the environmental crisis and supports civil society in its struggles.
Is plastic getting a facelift?
The star of the stage of the recently concluded Design Week in Paris, plastic seems to have moved beyond the disdain it had been experiencing lately. Thanks to recycling, its environmental footprint is now better controlled, which has turned into a real selling point. But beyond the material itself, it is an entire production logic that should be “recycled” to extricate ourselves from the dogma of newness and disposability.
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stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!