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Timothée Boitouzet

Timothée Boitouzet is an architect, biologist and entrepreneur. His career led him to Dominique Perrault, Henning Larsen, Herzog & Meuron and PCA-STREAM and then to the laboratories of MIT and Harvard. Since then, he founded the Woodoo start-up, which is developing a high-performance wood material that has been reconstructed from a molecular point of view to give it new features. His work seeks to combine nature and technology to invent the bio-sourced materials of tomorrow.

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Reinventing Wood

Timothée Boitouzet

Vidéo

Reinventing Wood

Timothée Boitouzet is an architect and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the startup Woodoo, which develops a high-performance wood – a form of “augmented” wood, even more performing than the material provided by Nature. In this talk, he presents his approach, which is part of the bio-economy. Timothée Boitouzet based his research on the will to design a high-performance construction material that respects the environment. This is a concrete example of adaptation to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the sign of a new alliance with the living. This material, however, raises the question of the manipulation of nature, its overcoming to serve the interests of Man.

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Augmented Wood

Timothée Boitouzet

Article

Augmented Wood

Building the city with and for the living also means increasing the use of the organic materials that nature provides. An architect, entrepreneur and biologist, Timothée Boitouzet emphasizes that we live in a time of transgression of the dogmas of modern architecture and of an evolution in ways of thinking and designing, embodied by an interdisciplinary approach of architecture and science. The architect now plays the role of interface in order to transcend the simple creation of inert forms and engage organic processes of construction. Boitouzet has been developing a high-performance wood material—rot-proof, rigid, and translucent—by replacing lignin with a plant resin, thus preserving the wood’s internal geometry. Similar to different products of the bio-economy, this eco-responsible material, at once organic and hyper-technological, is the sign of a new alliance with the living, in such a way as to serve and go beyond nature.

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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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