Video: ‘Architectures in Transition’ conferences
From January to May 2024, on the initiative of the Maison de l'Architecture Occitanie - Pyrénées, the Institut supérieur des arts et du design in Toulouse hosted a series of conferences entitled ‘Architectures in Transition’, featuring architects from the Plan Común (FR), Lacol (ES), Raumlabor (DE) and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (FR) agencies. ‘Architecture, like everything else, is in transition’. AA presents the four videos shot during this series of conferences.
Kim Courrèges and Nissim Haguenauer (Plan Común), February 2024
Plan Común is a French-Chilean architecture architecture office founded in 2012 and based in Paris and Santiago. They develop strategies to maximise and strengthen shared and collective spaces, the common good, using simple architectural tools, through research, content publishing, exhibition design, architectural or urban projects. Commissions, whether public or private, are subject to a strategic approach aimed at reassessing uses and spatial hierarchies, considering architecture as part of a complex network of different conditions and interests.
Their latest project, La Maison Commune, was featured in AA's February 2024 issue ‘Out of the Box’.
Cristina Gamboa (Lacol), March 2024
Lacol is a non-profit working cooperative founded in 2009 by 14 architects in the Sants district of Barcelona. Their work is based on a horizontal working system that includes architecture, urban planning, housing policy and participatory processes, blurring the boundaries of different disciplines to define an interdisciplinary approach. Lacol aims to generate community infrastructures for sustainable living as a key tool for the urgent eco-social transition. The conference will present this mission and vision through a series of projects and initiatives where architecture, social economy and participation play a common role.
Lacol was featured in AA's « Europe, New Generation » de AA, paru en février 2022.
Markus Bader (Raumlabor), April 2024
Raumlabor is a collective of architects who advocate an architecture committed to urbanism and art through urban interventions. In various ways, Raumlabor explores the ways in which architecture and architects can participate in the major transformations required to live in an environment marked by the various successive crises of the 21st century. Considering architecture as a practice rather than a collection of objects, raumlabor experiments with urbanism based on collective action and knowledge exchange: assembling, building, cooking, recycling, dancing, etc. These actions take place in different educational, institutional or self-built contexts. Raumlabor offers open pedagogies for learning by doing in collaborative contexts. By experimenting with real utopias, raumlabor sets up complex spatial and social situations as testing grounds for transformation – testing grounds for a cooperative urban future.
Co-founder of raumlabor and professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Markus Bader is also an active member of the association Urbane Praxis in Berlin, the Floating University’s ‘learning spaces’ working group and the cooperative steering the transformation of the Haus der Statistik. Drawing on architecture as spatial practice, the conference will focus on these last two examples and discuss how public-citizen partnerships can now promote the transformation of sites, the production of knowledge, civic learning and empowerment towards new modes of urban governance.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, May 2024
‘A moratorium on new buildings. There’s no such thing as an innocent building. From galvanised steel beams to concrete walls, from lightweight reconstituted wood floors to polyurethane and polystyrene insulation, every component of the built environment is the product of extraction processes. Driven by voracious and impatient economic mechanisms, the production of the world’s built environment continues, insatiably fast and destructively. Yet the processes involved in this destruction have long been regarded as a necessary evil, with no direct connection to the discipline, education and practice of architecture. This neutrality is no longer tenable. The climatic and social emergency is a reality. The call for a moratorium on new construction stems from these emergencies and from the palpable lack of action on the part of the design disciplines and the construction industry. Between experience and a call to action, it proposes a leap into the abyss to imagine a less extractive future, made of what we have: not demolishing, not building new, building less, building with what we have, living with it differently and taking care of it.‘
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (DPLG, Ph.D. ETHZ) is an architect, urban planner and professor of architecture and urban design at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Formerly a professor at the Graduate School of Design, her research focuses on contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergencies, and climate, spatial and social justice. She has recently published Immigration et ségrégation spatiale, L’exemple de Marseille (éditions Parenthèses, 2022) and the comic strip Eileen Gray: Une maison sous le soleil (Dargaud, 2020), among many other books and articles. His next book, A Moratorium on New Construction, will be published by Sternberg Press in autumn 2024.
« Architectures en transition », du 8 février au 16 mai 2024
Captation et montage : Romain Quartier
Sous-titres : Laurie Courivaud
Pour en savoir plus sur la programmation de la Maison de l'architecture Île-de-France, rendez-vous sur leur site internet.
