​

​

   

 

BUILDING IN A CONTEXT:

​

“Fuck the context” they said out of cynicism or utopia, thinking of the city of tomorrow as disconnected from that of yesterday, from the ground even if it could -  The dystopian city of the film “Blade Runner” and its urban monuments connected by skyways, below the pedestrians languish in the darkness and smoke of the overwhelming global city.

This is what we don't want...

​

“we must re-earth ourselves, that is to say in this case that architecture, by resituating itself, rises from the Earth no less than it descends from the stars” Augustin Berque Geographer extract (environment and architecture) from Yann Nussaume architect and professor of architecture.

Through this simple assertion, Augustin Berque relocates architecture in its context, its environment. Far from the theories of the 20th century and its universalist modernism (international style according to Hitchcock and Johnson), witness to an era where we thought of solving the problems linked to architecture in a global way, we believe that architecture is registered above all in a territory in which it will create places (places of life, places of exchange, places in interaction with an existing environment (nature, resources, energy, social construction, way of life, constructive mode... )

​

Nevertheless, architectural objects sometimes “fallen from the sky” highlighting the technical prowess of their designers remain a showcase appreciated by the public but should not, in our opinion, serve as an example for architectural production as a whole.

​

Today we know the urban and social ravages of (everyone builds in their own corner) and zoning (non-mixing of spaces which have become de facto segregative "heterotopias" according to Michel Foucault), groups without links between them, thought of without the city , without the pedestrian, for the car, without concerns for the environment or resources; context in short.

“Non-places”

​

However, in the 1980s in his work “  Modern architecture”, in full illusion of a global world with limitless resources and infinite growth. Kenneth Frampton theorized after Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre what he called “critical regionalism” as opposed to “world civilization” and “Dirty Realism”: a form of return of certain architects to local culture and identity .

Without completely turning our back on modernity or sinking into the neo-regionalist pastiche that undermines our urban peripheries, we share in  largely these values of an architecture situated and inherited from a pre-existing context.

The issues have since changed and the world has accelerated, the notion of eco-responsibility is today inseparable from our profession as much as that of the Anthropocene: resources are increasingly rare and ecosystems are impacted; we must take this into account by taking our part and taking appropriate measures.

​

AH

​