New imaginaries
This theme raises the question of the new forms of narrative driving the emergence of a new post-anthropocene aesthetic, moving towards more inclusive models of our relation to the environment.
“ Architecture has a unique relationship with the transformation of reality: it is, in a way, atlastic. ”
“ Architecture has a unique relationship with the transformation of reality: it is, in a way, atlastic. ”
Architecture is a political practice
Manuel Bello Marcano is an architect, lecturer at ENSA Saint-Etienne and sociologist of the imaginary at the Centre d’études pour l’actuel et le quotidien – CEAQ, Université Paris Descartes (Center for Current and Everyday Studies at Paris Descartes University). In his view, architecture is an act of aggregation designed to put the world in order: in this sense, he is interested in the political fictions mobilized to equip our thinking and, in this case, to build a “ togetherness ”. Follow his words and discover animality understood as community.
Fabrique de l'Art
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In a context of changing cultural practices that question the future of museums, the Centre Pompidou launched a competition for the creation of a new conservation center. This competition was won by the architectural firm PCA-STREAM under “La Fabrique de l'Art” (The Art Factory) project submission. Housing the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Picasso Museum, it will offer a comprehensive collection and conservation facility leveraging an innovative approach whereby, under one building, there will be both a facility for cutting-edge research/conservation and a public engagement space. The project, which is set within a delightful park, will become a new central location for residents of the Île-de-France region.
Micro lives and giga solutions
Marie-Sarah Adenis is a designer and co-founder of PILI, a company that develops biocoloring agents using microorganisms: an alternative to their petrochemical production. But the heart of her job is to harness the image of “microbes” to overcome the limitations of our imaginations and inject a touch of onirism into the dusty scientific narrative inherited from Pasteur.
Site-specific art, invading architecture
Stripes, banners and colored filters are all part of the signature of renowned artist Daniel Buren. His work is rooted in the landscapes and architectures that welcome him and have become his open-air studio. In an exclusive interview with architect Philippe Chiambaretta, he talks about his attraction to transparency and his many collaborations. Discover Les Nuages Colorés, which cover the glass roof of 175 Haussmann with shimmering lights.
The “Champs-Élysées — history & perspectives” study
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The Champs‑Élysées, History & Perspectives exhibition presents the study conducted between 2018 and 2020 at the behest of the Comité Champs‑Élysées by PCA-STREAM in collaboration with some fifty researchers, historians, scientists, engineers, artists, and economic and cultural actors from France and abroad. It traces the development of “the most beautiful avenue in the world,” analyzes its current usages, and proposes a vision of its potential evolutions in response to the challenges this area of the city faces in the present day. The Champs-Élysées is becoming a collective space to experiment with the development of a sustainable, desirable and inclusive city by 2030 through focusing on four main strategic priorities: reducing the impact of urban mobilities, rethinking nature as an ecosystem, seeking new uses, and the use of data for measurement and regulation.
Tourist Office of Versailles
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The new Versailles Tourist Office is intended to improve the reception of the millions of tourists to the château, while allowing them to discover the richness and variety of the city's cultural activities. In dialogue with a contemporary grove by landscape designer Nicolas Gilsoul, PCA-STREAM reinterprets the figure of the pavilion to offer a sober and minimal building, combining modernity and classicism, as a synthesis of what Versailles can offer the world.
Exploring the possibilities of a feminist architecture
Iris Handschin is an architect. In her final year thesis, DMC: Démocratie, matriarcale, citoyenne (DMC : Democracy, Matriarchy, Citizenship), she explores the relationship between sisterhood and architecture. How can we create a shared space of freedom and undo the hierarchical relationships at play in both private and public spaces? Exploring the possibilities of a feminist architecture inspired by the beguinages, Iris Handschin focuses on the rehabilitation of a former textile factory dating from the 1740s, outlining the contours of a truly democratic space.
Aesthetic of Structures
Aesthetic of Structures is a collective work published by the Architects-Engineers & Engineers-Architects association (AAIIA). Established agencies, young practitioners, researchers and students discuss a new relationship with structures, moving away from the Vitruvian principles of utility, solidity and beauty, towards an economy of materials, reversibility of use and the reuse of materials. Here we meet two of the book’s designers: architect-engineer Antoine Laugier and graphic designer Thanh-Phong Lê, who give us an insight into the book, as an object and as a structure.
The art of artificial life
Justine Emard is a visual artist. Her installations use AI to understand the living, exploring the boundaries between organic life and artificial intelligence. Bee swarms, encephalographic recordings and prehistoric paintings become learning supports for algorithms that, contrary to dystopian imaginations, generate new supra-hyper-organisms.
Nose to nose with the world
Never once has Sissel Tolaas, Norwegian artist, chemist, linguist and researcher, uttered the word “perfume”. For the past twenty-five years, she has been collecting, inventing and breathing new life into smells, refusing to be part of the world’s aseptisation. Through her olfactory installations, she invites us to sense reality, its geography and its temporality. Most recently, she has recreated the smell of Pompeii, between sensory experience and memory of the past.
Looking at the city from a gender perspective
For feminist geographer Leslie Kern, the urban environment is not neutral and stems from norms and power dynamics. She calls for a greater variety of urban user needs to be examined, and for physicality to be reintroduced into urban design. This translates into spatial and social interventions around mixed use considerations and taking into account marginalised voices in decision-making processes.
MOCO — Contemporary art center
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A new institution for the arts in Montpellier, the MOCO brings together the Panacée and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole around the Montcalm Hotel. This headquarters for contemporary creation aims to federate the art scene in Southern France, and to break with cultural centralism, while at the same time avoiding a repetition of the “Bilbao” recipe of the spectacular object. It explores the possibilities for the transformation of the city through art in line with an organic model that rises to the contemporary challenges of regenerating historic cores and recycling existing architecture. The MoCo is in phase with a younger generation’s aspirations towards collective appropriation, co-production and the idea of making do with and together.
Center for Contemporary Creation in Tours
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The Center for Contemporary Creation (CCC) of Tours occupied a dilapidated location that was devoid of identity. PCA-STREAM conducted an experimental reflection on the identity of this place of artistic production, eventually leading to an architectural project of a second skin for the façade. One hundred and fifty blades of LED-backlit Plexiglas make up an organic and shifting scenery that interacts with the street and the public. This hybrid object between sculpture and architecture has become the emblem of the CCC.
Pinchuk Art Centre
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PCA-STREAM has designed a museum for the art collection of the Ukrainian philanthropist Victor Pinchuk in the heart of the historical city center of Kiev. Inaugurated in 2006, this center is a beacon for contemporary art in Eastern Europe and has contributed to the promotion of cultural exchanges between the East and the West these past ten years.
Light room
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"Pièce Lumineuse" is both a piece of architecture and a work of art. It was developed for the Center for Contemporary Creation in Tours and the Palais de Tokyo by PCA-STREAM and Orlan, a pioneering artist and theoretician of “Carnal Art.” This work explores the sensual and experimental dimension of Orlan’s oeuvre, while at the same time illustrating the rich exchanges and artistic collaborations that PCA-STREAM promotes in order to bring some degree of “otherness” to its design work.
Is the city going round in circles?
Léonie Debrabandère is the Director of the WAAO, Lille’s architecture center, and curator of the exhibition “La ville tourne en rond?” How can we get away from anthropocentric, productivist logics and create a city that self-regulates, regenerates and recycles itself? The exhibition takes us on a semantic and tangible exploration of the circular city, allowing anyone to implement re-usable solutions on all scales.
Representing modularity
Pablo Valbuena is a visual artist. He creates rhythmic light installations to represent time and movement, altering our perceptions of space. His “illusions” distort reality and reveal imperceptible information. We collaborated together on the creation of the Modulation artwork, a series of luminous combinations evoking modularity.
City-Metabolism Chair
Périg Pitrou is an anthropologist at the CNRS and head of the “Anthropology of Life” team at the Collège de France. He is Scientific Director of the City-Metabolism Chair, which brings together PCA-STREAM and PSL University (Paris Sciences et Lettres). The aim: to identify how interdisciplinary collaborations can help overcome the challenges of building the urban worlds of the future.
The Urban Fable of Informality
Dorcas Mabanza-Kuma is a graduate from the architectural school ENSA Versailles. In her final thesis, which won an award from the Maison de l’Architecture Île-de-France, architecture turns into a place between fiction and documentation to question the ways of dwelling that are customarily described as informal. A matter of perspective…
“ Meteorology as a Model of Thought. ”
“ Meteorology as a Model of Thought. ”
Meteorology as a Model of Thinking
Anouchka Vasak is a lecturer in French literature. At the juncture between climate history and climate science, she elaborates a model of thinking based on meteorology, shifting like clouds. Her book 1797 – Pour une pensée météore [1797 – For Meteorology as a Model of Thought] is its “Discourse on the Method”.
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.
Don't forget to feed your pet-painting!
Michel Blazy is a tamer artist, whose work results from collaborations with snails, mosquitoes, molds or bacteria. Exhibited at the Portique (Centre d’art contemporain du Havre) until December 18, he questions, through his living works, the temporality of art and the borders between the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial. Extract of the article Encouraging the matter published in STREAM 04 : The paradoxes of the living
Histories and imagineries of climate change
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science, technology, and the environment. He contributed to popularizing the concept of the Anthropocene in France with his book The Shock of the Anthropocene, which he co-wrote with Christophe Bonneuil. With Les Révoltes du ciel [The Revolts of the Sky], co-written with Fabien Locher, he traces the history of our relations to climate change to put into perspective our contemporary vision of environmental issues.
A contemporary planetarium
Currently a curator at Foundation LUMA in Arles, Martin Guinard is co-curator, with Bruno Latour and Eva Lin, of the 2020 Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art. The exhibition consisted in a planetarium in which each version of the Earth reflects different lifestyles, as well as the ways in which we predict the future, and was also held, in a scaled-down version, from November 2021 to April 2022 at the Centre Pompidou Metz.
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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stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!
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