Eager to share more generously the fruits of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, a digital research and innovation magazine that explores the making of the metabolic city.
Kalina Raskin is the head of Ceebios, the Center for Studies and Expertise in Biomimicry. Her ambition is to accelerate the R&D in biomimicry in France and turn it into an efficient driver of the ecological transition, reconciling biodiversity, innovation, and the economy.
Philosopher and architecture school faculty member Chris Younès advocates implementing “regenerative synergies” so that “building” can stop going hand in hand with “destroying.” We need to learn to collaborate and observe the dynamics of nature, but also work towards a new form of harmony—not only in esthetic, but also in ethical and political terms—in order to improve the construction of inhabited environments.
Marine Calmet is a lawyer specializing in environmental law. Her commitment to fight against the devastation inflicted on ecosystems and local populations by industrial actors has led her to co-found Wild Legal, a nonprofit/school that organizes moot courts simulating trials where nature would hold new rights.
Geochemist Jerôme Gaillardet is investigating the Earth’s “critical zone,” the very thin inhabitable layer where the interdependencies between the living and the non-living are at play. In order to understand how this complex system operates, we shouldn’t be splitting the sciences off from one another. For this reason, Jérôme is involved in the innovative approach of creating interdisciplinary observatories.
Manon Denerier recently graduated from the interior design school École Camondo, receiving full honors for her exploratory work along the regional express railway line RER A. Shedding the functionalist logic of mobility (11 hours on foot instead of a 33-minute ride), she engaged in a sensory experience of a journey through “invisible cities,” proposing micro-amenities to raise their profile.
What we are currently calling AI has, in fact, very little to do with intelligence, although it does indeed make use of tremendous memory capabilities and computing power. The leading figure of French robotics, Bruno Maisonnier, is engaged in the challenge of developing an AI operating like a brain, using very little energy and data, while also being capable of justifying decisions. Would this be an AI with self-learning capabilities?
Space, earth, water, and time. These are the key ingredients for an intelligent conditioning of plants in our cities. They are also what is sorely lacking in our cities. What good habits should be followed to reconcile plantations and urban constructions and what knowledge must we develop?
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 two artists focus on recreating autonomous digital worlds. By interacting with their artworks, onlookers change the shape of mountains, generate strong winds, or obstruct the provision of life-essential light, upsetting the balance of the virtual communities, which wither, migrate, or transform accordingly. Humans, just as in the “real” world, turn into geological forces.
To question our notions of nature and culture, artist Olafur Eliasson recreates artificial environments within enclosed spaces. He thus shakes up the mysteries of the origins and temporality, and blurs the boundaries of reality in such a way that leaves viewers wondering whether mist, earth, rocks, and water are involved as sculptural elements or as agents and co-authors of the artworks themselves.
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!