What attitudes can designers adopt to respond to the questions and challenges posed by architecture in light of the awareness of the finite nature of resources?

In 1997, the architecture agency SCAU (Search and Creative Alternatives Uses) completed an office building on the edge of the Parisian ring road. Twenty years later, the agency was entrusted with the complete rehabi­litation of the building.

This book bears witness to a new kind of architectural practice: an architectural agency rehabilitating its own production with a research objective into issues of reuse and memory. 

The in situ transformation of architectural material is an alternative to the principle of tabula rasa. Reuse, recycling and other recovery methods also enable architects to divest themselves of the postures of conservation or restoration. The existing building and its physical persistence become the creative material. Which memories does the project contain? What forms, what materialities, do they take on? Are they visible only by their materialisation? Faced with their own production, what attitudes can designers adopt to respond to the questions and challenges posed by architecture in light of the awareness of the finite nature of resources?

Contributors:
Michel Poivert, professor of art history at the Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, founder of Chaire histoire de la photographie, critic and curator;
Bruno Delamain et Claudia Imbert, photographers.

Format: 24 × 32 cm
Pages: 96
ISBN: 978–2–919380–66-4
Release: 2023
Languages: French/English
Domains: Architecture, Urbanism, Landscape
Price: €35.00

Graphic design: Building Paris
Printing: Imprimerie Ott, Wasselonne (67), France