Eager to share more generously the fruits of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, a digital research and innovation magazine that explores the making of the metabolic city.
Dorcas Mabanza-Kuma is a graduate from the architectural school ENSA Versailles. In her final thesis, which won an award from the Maison de l’Architecture Île-de-France, architecture turns into a place between fiction and documentation to question the ways of dwelling that are customarily described as informal. A matter of perspective…
In France, the construction sector accounts for one third of the country’s CO2 emissions. Materials, which are partly responsible for this ratio, are extracted, transported, processed, poured or placed, dumped or incinerated… All these steps are opportunities to work on limiting impacts, involving architects, among other things, in deploying a new aesthetic.
Claire Doussard is an urban planner and researcher in the field of urban development. She focuses on measuring urban metabolisms and comparing various types of urban fabric in order to define the most environmentally friendly forms and ways of operating. Reviews and perspectives that face a great difficulty: data collection!
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.
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.
Victor De Bono is an architecture PhD student and civil engineer. He is working with 3D printing technology developed by the private company XtreeE for large-scale construction which saves material by placing it sparingly, “in the right place.”
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.
“ Meteorology as a Model of Thought. ”
“ Meteorology as a Model of Thought. ”
Anouchka Vasak is a lecturer in French literature. At the juncture between climate history and climate science, she elaborates a model of thinking based on meteorology, shifting like clouds. Her book 1797 – Pour une pensée météore [1797 – For Meteorology as a Model of Thought] is its “Discourse on the Method”.
“The office is dead, long live the office!” Whether this is a fad or actual societal transformation, articles and reports are on the rise and continue to predict a disruption in office real estate. A review of 30 years of prospective and retrospective thinking questioning office real estate programs can provide us with the key to a better understanding of this phenomenon.
These days we are generating a lot of data simply by carrying our phones around and consenting cookies on websites. While some of the data collected can be accessed by researchers for social good, other data is being used to provide targeted advertisements. Companies buy and sell our data, what is currently lacking is a mechanism for individuals to get a grasp of where their personal data is being used and for what purpose. An article by Saulė Gabrielė, Nadia Leonova and Lukas Utzig, Urban AI’s Emerging Leaders. Discover the extended version, Who owns your data ?
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!