Manipulating the Living?
In this interview, the Cellular biologist François Képès calls for us to move beyond Manichean discourses in the debate around the manipulation of the living by making the question of use our main priority.
François Képès
François Képès is a cellular biologist and research director at the Institute of Systems Biology and Synthesis at Genopole d'Evry. His aim is to better understand the functioning of living systems, especially micro-organisms (bacteria or yeasts), and to influence their genome in order to call them a function. He is the author of many popular works, including Synthetic Biology, stronger than nature? (La Biologie de synthèse, plus forte que la nature ?).
Manipulating the Living?
Learning lessons from acknowledging the living presupposes a better knowledge of it. Cellular biologist François Képès emphasizes that the living is certainly characterized by evolution—permitting adaptation—metabolic functioning—the ability to transform incoming resources into differentiated products—but also by the capacity to mobilize local concentrations so as to optimize reactions. He distinguishes systems biology, which analyzes and explains, from synthetic biology which uses this understanding to act upon the living. Adding new molecules to traditional products of the living so as to compensate for the non-renewability of environmental resources, seems to him, despite a certain lack of understanding, to represent major progress. It is not a question of wanting to control the living, but rather one of domestication and negotiation, based on cooperation and care rather than domination. In this way, Képès calls for us to move beyond Manichean discourses in the debate around the manipulation of the living by making the question of use our main priority.
Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
Collaborating with situations
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Design: Reparation
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
From "Mediance" to Places
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
An Attempt to Drain Places
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation
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.
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