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
Justine Emard is a visual artist. Her installations use AI to understand the living, exploring the boundaries between organic life and artificial intelligence. Bee swarms, encephalographic recordings and prehistoric paintings become learning supports for algorithms that, contrary to dystopian imaginations, generate new supra-hyper-organisms.
Never once has Sissel Tolaas, Norwegian artist, chemist, linguist and researcher, uttered the word “perfume”. For the past twenty-five years, she has been collecting, inventing and breathing new life into smells, refusing to be part of the world’s aseptisation. Through her olfactory installations, she invites us to sense reality, its geography and its temporality. Most recently, she has recreated the smell of Pompeii, between sensory experience and memory of the past.
“ 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.
“ What science fiction does to the city. ”
“ What science fiction does to the city. ”
Space is one of the great imaginary worlds of science fiction. By often depicting dystopian cities, authors sketch the contours of a desirable urbanity. Using science fiction as a field of investigation, Pierre-Antoine Marti, a PhD candidate in history at EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), uses representations of the future as a dataset for prospective reflection on the interplay between science fiction and innovation.
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?
“ Building cities, deconstructing methods. ”
“ Building cities, deconstructing methods. ”
Through the act of building, architect, experimenter and 2019 Grand Prix de l’urbanisme Patrick Bouchain questions public commissioning and puts it to the test of reality. His comments echo those of Philippe Chiambaretta in Faire la ville autrement, recently published by Flammarion.
PCA-STREAM is conducting the heavy restructuring of a real estate complex designed in the 1960s, tackling the obsolescence of an architecture that offers low-quality spaces in light of the new expectations of businesses. The façade is modernized and realigned on Rue de Penthièvre, and a new wing is formed at the end of the parcel, opening on a vast garden at the heart of the block. The intervention combines densification and the upgrading of workspaces, which are equipped with sunny, green terraces.
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.
LUMA Arles is dedicated to supporting contemporary artistic creation. Designed as a creative campus, it promotes the Camargue region in which it is located: its landscapes, materials and know-how. Maria Finders, co-founder of the Atelier LUMA design laboratory, tells us about this atypical place.
“ 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”.
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.
Michel Blazy is a tamer artist, whose work results from collaborations with snails, mosquitoes, molds or bacteria. Exhibited at the Portique (Centre d’art contemporain du Havre) until December 18, he questions, through his living works, the temporality of art and the borders between the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial. Extract of the article Encouraging the matter published in STREAM 04 : The paradoxes of the living
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science, technology, and the environment. He contributed to popularizing the concept of the Anthropocene in France with his book The Shock of the Anthropocene, which he co-wrote with Christophe Bonneuil. With Les Révoltes du ciel [The Revolts of the Sky], co-written with Fabien Locher, he traces the history of our relations to climate change to put into perspective our contemporary vision of environmental issues.
The co-founder of Les Sismo design agency, Antoine Fenoglio examines the integration of care ethics in design. In his collaborations with CNAM / GHU Paris and his hospital-based projects, he scrutinizes the procedures of restraint, which he seeks to shift towards care rather than seclusion.
The artist, whose work is being exhibited until March 20, 2022, at the Paris Museum of Hunting and Nature, reproduces forms that history has endlessly discarded and returned to. By imitating nature in order to draw closer to it, she evokes myths both ancient and contemporary. Between rebirth and abandonment, immerse yourself in her cardboard gardens.
Anthropologist and geographer Sonia Lavadinho has been working on issues related to sustainable mobility for the past fifteen years, and in particular on the way urban planning can improve walkability. She believes shifting from the “functional city” to the “relational city” will primarily stem from our relationship to time.
Lucile Viaud is a designer and “geoglass” artist. Working from salvaged materials, she crafts objects that carry within them the history of the territories from where the materials originate. Its snail or abalone shells, forgotten sands, and powdered seaweed are slices of fleeting time and result in objects that cannot be replicated.
Rob Hopkins is the instigator of the international “The Transition Towns” movement, which supports many environmentally responsible initiatives carried out by both municipalities and citizens. Its primary goal is to unleash our imagination in order to inspire the desire and the courage to act.
Artists are major protagonists of the way our representations and narratives change over time, through image as well as fiction, which Frédérique Aït-Touati views as playing a fundamental role in the advancement of sciences and the construction of a collective imaginary. She is thus engaged, through her alternative cartographies and theatrical performances, in “landing” the gaze we turn towards the earth in order to highlight our belonging to Gaia. Besides her research on the developments of our ontological representations, she promotes, through SPEAP program, a pedagogy of experience, multidisciplinarity, and the dialogue between art and science.
The challenge of the Anthropocene must be addressed through cities, not only because they cluster challenges, but also because, according to Michel Lussault, their desirability will not decline in spite of various crises. The urbanity specific to the “relational city” remains crucial as an experience of otherness, and, in that respect, going full digital or generalized teleworking would represent a “counter-social” development. The increasing complexity of our global urbanization reinforces the systemic inscription of cities and drives urbanism towards ever-increasing levels of cross-disciplinarity, an approach he promotes at the École Urbaine de Lyon, in particular around the “common health” concept, intended to spatially approach issues of social justice, public healthcare, and ecosystem restoration.
As multidisciplinary practices based on attention to a variety of intelligences are developing in response to contemporary complexity, the encounter between philosopher Cynthia Fleury and designer Antoine Fenoglio offers an example of an intersection of practices enriching a common vision around the “Design with Care” approach. This allows for “design with intent” based on the idea that fragility can help systemically extend the design practice to environmental and social issues. With the “proof of care” concept, experimentation itself becomes a form of care that leads to pondering modes of governance. Within this multidisciplinary approach of care, designers become integrators and act as diplomats between different types of expertise, building on their know-how in representation and prototyping.
Manon Denerier recently graduated from the interior design school École Camondo, receiving full honors for her exploratory work along the regional express railway line RER A. Shedding the functionalist logic of mobility (11 hours on foot instead of a 33-minute ride), she engaged in a sensory experience of a journey through “invisible cities,” proposing micro-amenities to raise their profile.
The trend towards smart cities reintroduces a functionalist vision of the city, generating ever-increasing amounts of data. But how can the parts of urbanity that cannot be reduced to quantified data to be optimized be considered? Larissa Fassler seeks to make visible what forms the urban experience through sensitive mapping that reveals an overlooked city.
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!