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Marie-Ange Brayer

Marie-Ange Brayer is curator of the Design & Industrial Prospective collections at Mnam-CCI, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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Animistic Intelligence: the In-Between Network of the Living and the Machine

Marie-Ange Brayer

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Animistic Intelligence: the In-Between Network of the Living and the Machine

Nature returns to the city, but can this new relationship with the living influence the very processes and materials of architecture? As early as the 1960s, the avant-gardes explored the ties between the intelligence of machines and that of the living, it is now possible to hybridize organic and synthetic materials, opening up an experimental field between biodesign and computer science, to create alternative biomaterials, as well as bio-inspired morphologies, in a symbiosis between the natural and artificial which is key to a more symbiotic relationship with our environment.

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Organic design: towards new artefacts

Marie-Ange Brayer

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Organic design: towards new artefacts

Confronted with environmental challenges, designers are exploring new materials that could replace plastics. Options include biodegradable, renewable, biobased, and self-growing materials. Discover three prototypes.

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Naturalizing architecture

Marie-Ange Brayer

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Naturalizing architecture

Since digital technologies have emerged, they have caused an epistemic rupture in the field of architecture. Initially misunderstood and rejected, this revolution now informs a large part of architectural research and has achieved an expressive power as well as operational capability on an unprecedented scale. Art historian Marie-Ange Brayer analyzes the recent evolutions of computational architecture and presents the work of a young generation of architects whose work revolves around temporalities, materials, and the self-organizing systems of living organisms. She explains the concept of “naturalization” in the field of architecture: a form of hybridization that makes it possible to rethink the opposition between nature and artifice. Marie-Ange Brayer is doctor in architecture and art history. From 1996 to 2014, she is the director of the Frac Centre.

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Work and Play in Experimental Architecture, 1960-1970

Marie-Ange Brayer

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Work and Play in Experimental Architecture, 1960-1970

Brayer looks at the once frozen, or static, work place as a thing of the past, noting that we are heading towards a more fluid environment. She draws examples from Jacques Tati’s film Playtime, Archigram’s work in displaying the mechanistic qualities of a building; to the work of Walter Pichler creating helmets that become extensions of the brain. She incorporates a myriad of examples to explain the individuals’ ability to absorb his or her space. Marie-Ange Brayer is doctor in architecture and art history. From 1996 to 2014, she is the director of the Frac Centre.

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Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community

Andrew Freear

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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.

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Collaborating with situations

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

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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.

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Design: Reparation

Nicolas Nova

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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?

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From "Mediance" to Places

Augustin Berque

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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.

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An Attempt to Drain Places

Larissa Fassler

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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.

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Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation

Armand Bernoud

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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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Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!

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