At the initiative of the Comité Grande-Armée, PCA-STREAM delivers "Grande-Armée 2030", a strategic vision for reintegrating the Avenue de la Grande-Armée into the urban dynamic of Paris's historic thoroughfare and adapting it to the challenges of the 21st century city.
Experiencing nature
15 Laborde
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Located near the Saint-Lazare train station, these new-generation offices in a former military barracks combine the best of two architectural heritages. They offer a comfortable and prestigious workplace, turned towards nature and the well-being of its users, French law firm Gide-Loyrette-Nouel. The building's heritage is magnified and remodeled, enhancing its attractiveness and competitiveness, while helping to write a new page in the history of Paris's ever-changing urban fabric.
“ Capturing the conflict between the songs of nature and urban noise. ”
“ Capturing the conflict between the songs of nature and urban noise. ”
The melody of the living
Frédéric Jiguet is an ornithologist and professor at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. In particular, he leads the STOC program: Suivi Temporel des Oiseaux Communs (Temporal Monitoring of Common Birds), which aims to understand the impacts of global change and the consequences of human activities on birds. We met him in situ, capturing the conflict between nature’s songs and urban noise.
Designing Soundscapes
Nadine Schütz is a sound architect. She lends a new dimension to urban landscapes thanks to sound installations and work on the acoustic environment. In this way, she highlights the role of sound in the sensory relationship of humans to their surroundings and in raising environmental awareness.
Transforming the City into a Museum for Contemporary Nature
As we are reconsidering our place as humans within nature, philosopher Emanuele Coccia investigates the natural phenomenon of metamorphosis and develops it into a philosophical concept that enables us to think about ourselves as part of a single breath of life that passes from one life form to another. Opposed to a penitential vision of environmentalism, he disagrees with the idea that the living should be viewed as fundamentally subsumed in the issue of ecological balances, life being a perpetual metamorphosis, poles apart from any notion of equilibrium. He champions the idea of a transformation of cities into “museums of contemporary nature” in order to overcome the conventional nature—culture divide and reinstate an urban interspecies approach focusing on cohabitation between all life forms and biodiversity.
The RER A Regional Express Railway: walking as a design tool
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.
Toward a wild Renaissance
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.
Letter to Pierre Huyghe
Nicolas Bourriaud sent this letter to Pierre Hyughe while the artist was on an expedition for several months. The historian and art critic questions the artist’s approach, addressing notions such as spare time and exploration in the light of a finite, well-known and already completely mapped world. How can the artist create knowledge on contemporary space without this knowledge being categorized in the existing disciplines? Nicolas Bourriaud is an art historian, art critic, theorist and exhibition curator. Since 2016, he is the director of the future Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo). A visual artist, Pierre Huyghe has long been associated with relational aesthetics, having explored the relationship between reality and fiction, the issue of memory, of expeditions and exhibitions. A recipient of many awards, and having been exhibited in the most prestigious international cultural institutions, he is now investigating the complexity of organic life, which is a way of departing from the control of authorship to create the conditions for the emergence of a self-evolving work. Catalog text for the GNS (Global Navigation System) exhibition, Palais de Tokyo, Éditions du Cercle d’art, Paris, 2003 (pp. 118‒9)
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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