He advises large companies, both in France and abroad, on their strategy, organization and management culture for nearly twenty years. After six years at KPMG Peat Marwick and eight years at Eurogroup Consulting, he co-founded Quartier Libre in 2013, a unique consultancy, study and exploration structure helping companies find unique and effective solutions to their strategic problems or organizational approaches by drawing inspiration from the understanding of new uses, ways of life and work. Quartier Libre
For nearly twenty years, Julien Eymeri has been advising large companies, both in France and abroad, on their strategy, organization and management culture. In 2013, he co-founded Quartier Libre, an unprecedented structure for consulting, study and exploration. We invited him to continue his reflection on the future of the office five years after his participation in STREAM 02 – After Office.
When one travels to visit the smart cities that are emerging everywhere on the planet, one is confronted with urban realities that are so novel that they seem to be perpetually underway. That is, should these cities finally fully materialize one day, and not simply remain an object of well-intentioned and more or less single-minded discourse. The consultant Julien Eymeri confronts for Stream his experience of Songdo (the Korean smart city) and Masdar (its Emirati equivalent), along with Detroit’s reinvention and transformation efforts to question the characteristics of cities in the digital era and the role of business in their development. Julien Eymeri is consultant at Quartier Libre Agency.
A consultant within the Eurogroup Consulting firm, Julien Eymeri questions the levers of business development in a global cost reduction. Having focused for many years on structural, organizational, financial and human subjects, the time has come to tackle the problem of space by approaching it with fresh eyes, to think of the workspace as a subject –its utility– rather than an object –its surface– and make the company a platform to make connections and facilitate lifelong learning; a source of innovation and performance but also of attractiveness and talent retention. A new organization of space must facilitate the time between connection and exchange and that of concentration and taking a stand back—a breath now essential to all forms of creation. Julien Eymeri advises large companies on their strategy, organization and management culture. He is the co-founder of he consulting firm Quartier Libre.
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!