For Daniel Buren, architecture is an open-air studio. In an exclusive interview with architect Philippe Chiambaretta, he talks about his site-specific work, where art and architecture meet, just like the Nuages Colorés that cover the scales of the 175 Haussmann glass roof.
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.
La Vie à l’œuvre (Life in the Making), a collective of researchers in the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, as well as artists, was set up at the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres in 2014 to explore interdisciplinary collective intelligence around the theme of the living. Functioning as an incubator of ideas, they explore the potential of living beings, particularly via experiments between art and science. A Stream 05 – New Intelligences article to discover!
Collective intelligence has become key to understanding and acting upon the complexity of the contemporary world. But how can the conditions for its advent be brought about? Originating in PSL, the “Life in the Making” collective, which brings together researchers in natural sciences, in the humanities, as well as artists, has been exploring this dialogue between intelligences around the theme of the living since 2014. By operating through a flexible framework, the collective has developed a praxis of interdisciplinary collective intelligence—all the while establishing new insights on life, in particular through experimentations between art and science.
AI is a new form of intelligence whose development is stirring up concerns and dystopian fables. Far from replacing human intelligence, AIs are emerging as new tools to be trained, controlled and shaped to achieve the desired result. For the artist, photographer, architect, film-maker, musician or illustrator, AIs become an agent with which to collaborate, resulting in co-creation. Inaugural lecture of the “AI and Creation” series at the Stream Innovation Center.
Eric Mangion has been director since 2006, after managing the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur from 1993 to 2005. His research has long been focused on the artistic gesture of disappearance – in all its forms, from the alteration of the work to the disappearance of the artist. At the Villa Arson, he develops a program around ephemeral practices. He develops here the link between his research topics – the disappearance, the ephemeral, in the art and more generally, in the culture – and the evolution of the architecture.
Using scientific facts as artistic material, Dutch artist Thijs Biersterker seeks to emotionally connect the public to global questions, to inspire a desire to take action. He uses technology, in particular AI, as a medium. His immersive installations highlight the intelligence and communication systems of plants: thus creating a bridge between living beings.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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
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.
A specialist of the living, philosopher Emanuele Coccia imagines how architects could make the cohabitation between species possible without necessarily having to carry out an act of ecological repentance or abandoning modernity. A “building as a forest” and a city as a natural reserve are a few examples of the irruption of fantasy within the city.
Lucile Viaud is a designer and “geoglass” artist. Working from salvaged materials, she crafts objects that carry within them the history of the territories from where the materials originate. Its snail or abalone shells, forgotten sands, and powdered seaweed are slices of fleeting time and result in objects that cannot be replicated.
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.
The urban challenges of the Urbanocene have brought back into the spotlight the complexity of cities as a milieu and the lack of relevance of siloed knowledge and protagonists within modern urbanism. We must develop new approaches and foster urban innovation—but how can the protagonists making of the city of the future be trained to address this challenge? Aalto University, and, in particular, the Design Factory, headed by Kalevi Ekman, point towards a new approach. Born from the merger of three universities in Helsinki—in Technology, Art and Design, and Business—, it encourages cross-disciplinary tracks, entrepreneurial mindset, and prototype-based learning.
The Anthropocene invites us to move beyond the idea of progress, universalism, and the logic of separation or domination of the modern project. It results in a fundamental change in the paradigm of contemporary art, especially around ecofeminist practices, which Tara Londi views as stemming from the feminist avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The critique of the capitalist exploitation of nature, therefore, ties in with that of the patriarchal oppression of women in ecofeminist artistic practices, revealing the unspoken history of women, Indigenous peoples, or animals. Beyond the rationalism of the visual realm and of language, archaic animist and holistic visions are revived.
Artists experience the shared condition of being both protagonists and victims of the Anthropocene, and therefore see their role dramatically altered. For Tomás Saraceno, the exceptionalism of the artist’s position matters less than the catalyzing of new ways of thinking and inhabiting the world. The aim is to find solutions by collaborating with humans and non-humans, as in his installation set up with Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, where spider intelligence took the forefront. Such new rituals of encounter with art endeavor to highlight relationships with the Earth that go beyond an ethic of extraction. With the alternative epoch of the Aerocene, Saraceno works along with an interdisciplinary community of artists, researchers, and citizens in order to break free from the Modern narrative of division and offer concrete alternatives, as with the experience of the flight of the Aerocene Pacha, in collaboration with the elements and local populations.
The fundamental shift in the way mankind perceives and views its position in the world has earmarks of a new “Renaissance” according to Guillaume Logé. He observes many parallels with that of the fifteenth century, interpreted as a transhistorical phenomenon, in particular through artworks which have a symbiotic perspective that move beyond the modern monofocal perspective, or humans. More than the Anthropocene, he considers that the idea of the wild is the new frame of reference that will replace the great narratives, which disappeared with postmodernity. By leaving behind the human perspective and moving on to collaborations with the living, he calls into question our separation from it. He therefore views contemporary artists as moving ahead in the experimentation of the relational dimension within the turning point we are living through.
The trend towards smart cities reintroduces a functionalist vision of the city, generating ever-increasing amounts of data. But how can the parts of urbanity that cannot be reduced to quantified data to be optimized be considered? Larissa Fassler seeks to make visible what forms the urban experience through sensitive mapping that reveals an overlooked city.
Xavier Veilhan is a visual artist. He represents France at the 57th Venice Biennale. Since he has been collaborating with PCA-STREAM on a regular basis for a decade, we interviewed him for the documentary “PCA-STREAM: from research to action”. In this talk, he evokes his relationship to architecture, which he considers both as a constraint to the creation process and as a source of inspiration and reflection that nourishes his practice.
As part of the documentary “PCA-STREAM: From research to action”, we interviewed Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, historian of Architecture and professor at the Collège de France. He depicts a profession that is concerned about its place in the world today, and describes how architects are reinventing themselves in order to face the social, technical and environmental challenges of the 21st century.
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!