Contexte
2024
Non publié
Texte de candidature non lauréate
the horizon, our perception shifts. The last major shift in the architectural discipline coincides with the second industrial revolution and the introduction of concrete, steel and glass. These new materials, gradually adopted globally, and completed with the massive use of fossil fuels and electricity, are the foundations of what we call ‘modernity’ in architecture.
We believe that no comparable evolution has occurred since that time, and we largely inherit the world—in every sense—as it was projected, conceived, and built during that period.
The primary condition that has developed since the advent of modernity is the planetary phenomenon of climate change and mass extinction, driven by the massive and exponential combustion of fossil fuels. More than 50 years after Limits to Growth1, regulatory measures are slowly being taken to enact a reaction aimed at protecting us from the coming tragedy.
In the architecture field, the main incentive in France has been the RE2020—Réglementation Environnementale 20202—that took effect in January 2022. This evolution from the precedent thermal regulation includes new binding measures that must be taken into account during the design phase of new buildings. Since its introduction, architecture practices have started to develop a catalog of solutions that allow them to comply with this new regulation. Among others, this includes integrating bio-based materials (wood, cork, straw, stone), switching from usual concrete to ‘low-carbon’ concrete, adding solar panels on the project’s roof, working with a reuse consultant to value previously existing materials, etc.
While all these processes are valid and must be encouraged, we believe that they leave architects free to pursue their business as usual, simply switching to the latest trend in design principles. Against this slow movement—only receptive to legal obligation—we believe that architects are responsible for pro-actively transforming their practice through an in-depth—both self and collective—reassessment.
If we leave the technical side of this regulation, and move on to the latent concepts it contains, we note the introduction of a new dimension: the consideration of buildings’ carbon footprint throughout their lifecycle. This measure induces a potential change of perception for architects: buildings are no longer abstract objects miraculously landed on a plot, but they become part of their environment and its living cycles.
We firmly believe that words, concepts and beliefs are holding our world together. Our intuition is that we need to enquire on them to generate a coherent and useful reassessment of our architectural discipline. Beliefs—whether popular or religious—are too often avoided or ignored3. By remaining taboo, they hinder our ability to rearrange our relationship with the world. To engage in such questions is not to rise above things but to dig down to discover their roots, what they are fed from, and what they are based on.
We are beings of beliefs, permanently attached to them. Nevertheless, the theological framework that history has maintained is beginning to distort. The horizon has shifted, becoming destiny, luminous reason, or technical progress, while retaining the same pattern of a beginning and an end, either ecstatic or apocalyptic. Our beliefs are shattering, necessitating the creation of new, realistic, and collective ones to form a common and fertile ground amidst a fractured universal.
Contemporary Western thought aims to redefine the human subject, decentering its relationship to the world. Modernity—from Kant and the Copernican revolution—linked thought and reality, but now the real is seen as independent of our representation. This shift turns our laws, norms, and History into a sort of fiction, only real through its effects.
Merleau-Ponty, referencing the gestaltist psychologist Wertheimer4, illustrates how perception adjusts to make sense of oblique scenes. Similarly, fiction reorients our perspective, grounding us in reality. History, as Fiction, shapes our life’s orientation.
Explorations of disorientation, like British-Australian philosopher Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology5, highlight the need to question historical foundations and decolonize time to construct a future. History is open and fractal, a Fiction yet to be written.
We must undertake the synchronization of our beliefs, concepts and words with the veracity of the world we witness. The Christian roots of our Western civilization have led us to detach from the physis of the world. The (re)generative power of the beings that compose our world has been annihilated by the introduction of the power of creation and production through the sole will of an abstract being. Time as a cycle of life and death has been denied and transformed into infinity.
What does it mean for us architects to shift our perspective from seeing ourselves as creators to viewing ourselves as one among many agents contributing to the generation of spaces? What does it mean to embrace the diversity and intricacies of bodies instead of adhering to the notion of a uniform and mechanized body?
In this context, we situate our current research as a project of individual and collective metanoia6. In addition to the legal and material evolution of the architectural discipline, we seek to synchronize our beliefs to the current conditions we live in. This radical—in the primary sense, at the root—undertaking holds the power to meaningfully redistribute our role as architects in the midst of the current cataclysmic circumstances. Our beliefs are the soil in which our way of understanding the world is rooted, and thus how we operate within it. Suddenly, by crossing
Footnotes
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MEADOWS Donella H. [et al.] (1972). The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Universe Books, New York. ↩
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In Belgium, the current equivalent is the PEB regulation, derived from a 2010 European directive, the EPBD (Energy Performance of Buildings Directive). ↩
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This idea is backed by the valuable work of French philosopher Émilie Hache: De la génération, Enquête sur sa disparition et son remplacement par la production (2024, Éditions La Découverte, Paris). Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich will also be useful guides in this quest. ↩
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MERLEAU-PONTY Maurice (1976). La phénoménologie de la perception. Editions Gallimard, p.197. ↩
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AHMED Sara (2021). Orientations : vers une phénoménologie transpédégouine. Trou Noir online magazine, 28th of March 2021. ↩
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Definition the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: ‘metanoia: a transformative change of heart ; especially: a spiritual conversion’. ↩