Jeffrey Raven is an architect and a professor at the New York Institute of Technology, co-chair of the American Institute of Architects’ Planning & Urban Design Committee. He is specialized in sustainable and resilient urban design.
Cities, like asphalt jungles, are dense inhabited spaces. Yet this density also helps limiting urban sprawl. Jeffrey Raven is a professor at the New York Institute of Technology and an architect specializing in resilient urban design. He advocates for the positive aspects of urbanization and seeks to resolve urban heat island effects by exploring the form, function, materiality and vegetation of the urban fabric.
Urban density, though challenged by the pandemic, remains beneficial in mitigating sprawl. As urbanization nevertheless impacts the climate, the challenge, for Jeffrey Raven, lies in working on the actual shape and configuration of this density to make it sustainable and sound. Running counter to technological solutionism, this involves measures such as creating microclimates which provide ecosystem services following a holistic approach. He views the district as the proper spatial scale to operate at, due to its specific metabolism and because it is one of the most nimble scales to experiment at, through intermediate forms of governance. Architects gain a central role in coordinating synergies between the stakeholders involved, pragmatically understanding their interests, and, thanks to their skills in prototyping, offering a shareable narrative around “zero carbon” demonstration projects.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!