Rocio Calzado Lopez and Manon Espinasse will speak at the OCS/AUSser laboratory seminar on Monday, November 18, 2024, at 6:00 p.m.
This session will take place in the boardroom (Banham space) at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture Paris-Est.
The session will open with a presentation by Rocio Calzado Lopez: "While the housing crisis is the starting point for this research, the alarming context of social housing demolitions is the subject to be examined. To discuss this crisis and examine these demolitions, this research addresses the relationship between the three dimensions of politics (politics, policy, and polity) and architecture, and questions not whether architecture is political, but rather how architecture is political. What are the material resources of a building that influence governance processes? Perhaps if we trace the political role of buildings in the decision-making behind a demolition, we could learn something new about the role of architects in the current housing crisis.
To explore this idea, I develop the biography of two housing complexes, one in Rome and the other in Paris, which were about to be demolished but instead ended up undergoing a long process of transformation. "Beyond Demolition, Caring for Architecture" is not a finished work, but an ongoing research project, tested both through a doctoral project currently underway at the LATTS laboratory at the École des Ponts et Chaussées and a documentary film produced by the film collective "docar," with the support of the Pavillon de l'Arsenal. The session will begin with the screening of several excerpts from the documentary.
It will continue with a presentation by Manon Espinasse: "The highway is an infrastructure considered essential to the functioning of our current societies and economies.
Since its inception, it has been the subject of a series of actions (repair, adaptation, regeneration, transformation) to ensure its permanence. Because it both contributes to exceeding planetary limits and is exposed to the consequences of these exceedances, it has been included in public policies for "ecological transition." The highway (as a socio-technical system) of the 21st century is increasingly "multi-functional ": a support for plural mobility (from automobility to shared mobility), a habitat for biodiversity and carbon sinks (in its dependencies and edges), a vector for renewable energy (from the highway hosting urban networks to the highway producing urban solar energy). This diversified highway is being built in the Bordeaux metropolitan area, based on the one that originated in the late 1960s. It is the result of adjustments and reconfigurations between highway planning and land-use planning (and their imaginaries) since 1967, which gave rise to specific architectural, urban, landscape, and infrastructural forms. This paper proposes to look at the early stages of the Bordeaux motorway, the genesis of the co-construction of the motorway and the metropolis, and to question the "infrastructural permanence."
In the 1960s, the highway was a local and national project, a tool for establishing Bordeaux as a balanced metropolis (DATAR) and a city with over a million inhabitants (Jacques Chaban Delmas). This highway of metropolitanization was both a means of large-scale development in the creation of Bordeaux as a metropolis (as seen in the development plans) and a means of economic development (as seen in the aerial photographs)."