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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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!