To inaugurate the new season of the Stream Innovation Center, our place for exploring the city of tomorrow, we are launching a series of conferences dedicated to artificial intelligence and creation. From October to December, artists, designers, architects, photographers and historians will be invited to share their experiences and debate the aims of this new tool. It's an opportunity to look back on 14 years of experimentation to move from theory to action, from the founding of Stream magazine to the inauguration of the City-Metabolism Chair with PSL University (Paris Sciences & Lettres). The profession has become an "explorer" of content and uses, as our friend Jean-Louis Cohen points out, whose words we listen to again with emotion.
Stream is a transdisciplinary magazine founded by Philippe Chiambaretta in 2009. By bringing together philosophers, sociologists, artists, engineers, biologists, economists and architects, it crystallizes a kaleidoscopic, forward-looking vision of the urban issues it tackles. It’s a way of doing research, by confronting expertise, at the crossroads of knowledge!
Etienne Riot, urban planning researcher, and Pauline Detavernier, architecture researcher, are at the heart of applied research and innovation at PCA-STREAM. Together, they talk about the different facets of this research, from a CIFRE contract, to the setting up of a university chair project, to the subjects explored by the collaborators.
Philosopher, researcher and architecture school teacher Chris Younès advocates the implementation of “regenerative synergies” to learn to collaborate, respect the dynamics of nature and seek a new form of harmony – not simply aesthetic but also ethical and political – to improve the manufacture of inhabited environments. An attitude advocated by many architectural researchers!
In 2017, on the occasion of the Lyon Biennale d’Architecture “Processus & Pratiques”, Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, architectural historian and professor at the Collège de France, reviewed the evolution of architectural research from the early 20th century to the present day, when the profession is being redefined by the acquisition of an analytical as well as a project-based function.
Périg Pitrou is an anthropologist, CNRS Research Director at the Maison Française d’Oxford and head of the “Anthropology of Life” team at the Collège de France. He is Scientific Director of the City-Metabolism Chair, which links the agency with PSL University (Paris Sciences et Lettres). The aim: to identify how interdisciplinary collaborations can help overcome the challenges of building future urban worlds.
The researcher and data scientist explores and experiments with how architects can use artificial intelligence to enhance their practice. A foretaste of the AI & Creation conference series, for which he will host the fourth session (11/20/23), accompanied by American architects Daniel Bolojan and Andrew Witt.
“ Building cities, deconstructing methods. ”
“ Building cities, deconstructing methods. ”
Through the act of building, architect, experimenter and 2019 Grand Prix de l’urbanisme Patrick Bouchain questions public commissioning and puts it to the test of reality. His comments echo those of Philippe Chiambaretta in Faire la ville autrement, recently published by Flammarion.
Léone-Alix Mazaud, a CIFRE doctoral student (PCA-STREAM / École des Mines), here repositioned our definition of the “metabolic city” within a history of approaches to urban “metabolism”; a long-standing metaphor used in the study of urban systems, yet one that has been reconfigured over time.
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.
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!