My project for Campus MaNa considers a new approach to building elements in light of the challenges posed by urban society. Two of these issues will be the main drivers of a reflection that is intended to be out of step with current design.

– The question of building elements in the context of the climate crisis and the requirements of frugality in terms of energy and resource consumption. In this reflection, each element cannot be considered in isolation, but must be placed in a new technical ecosystem.

– The view of the building element as essential to the relationship between the inhabitant and his environment. This relationship was reduced to nothing by functional architecture and industrial production. It is a question of finding a resonance between the building and the everyday experience. The pleasure of understanding, the desire for use, the freedom of appropriation, will be sensitive values that will be systematically compared with the ecological performance of the project.

The project will be carried out in a transversal practice that does not dissociate gesture from thought.

The theme of the workshop will be “living in the window”.

The window, and more generally the bay, is an essential element of the architecture.

“An opening of any function, arranged in a built part, and its framing” (Vocabulaire de l’Architecture, Imprimerie Nationale, 1972), the window has always been a fundamental constant of the aesthetics and the use of buildings. A reflection on the window and its cloaking devices cannot therefore go without a perspective in the history of architecture and especially the question of styles.

As such, it is a subject of debate. Let us mention only the one between Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier between vertical window and ribbon window.

– With regard to the aesthetic approach, it must also be included in the technical adventure: the opening is a challenge for the constructive device. To remove material is to remove the resistance of a section of wall. From the first constructions to modernity, passing through the Romanesque arch, the classical lintel, to reinforced concrete, the window is a subject of permanent innovation and reinvention.

At the start of the 1950s, the window even seemed to dissolve into a radical transformation with the development of the curtain wall, a transparent façade with no openings anymore.

– Is a window that no longer opens still a window? The relationship with ventilation highlights the link between the window and the overall constructive devices of a building. All the construction elements – windows, floors, ceilings, stairs, partitions – are part of a technical ecosystem from which they cannot be detached. The appearance of mechanical air conditioning in 1901 profoundly questioned the relationship of interior spaces with their environment. Now we have to “open the window” again.

– From cinema to painting, via literature and comics, the window has always been associated with a rich and abundant imagination. The window is the elsewhere, the dream, the sky, the fantastic, the unknown. It is what makes it possible to see, to hide and to be seen. In systems of oppression and confinement, it frustrates and constrains but also allows one to escape, to get away. The window is the place of all possibilities, it is synonymous with freedom. By focusing on its imagination and its representations, the window can thus be perceived as the catalyst for a reflection on the quality and habitability of our contemporary architecture.

– From an environmental angle, it is urgent to reconsider the window today. The climate crisis has encountered a brake on the use of air conditioning, the use of materials such as PVC and aluminum responsible for a poor CO2 balance, the size of the windows glazing. To this must be added the necessary shift from massive and globalized prefabrication to more local production that respects contextual know-how.

The window is at the intersection of multiple sustainable development issues.

– Finally, the window is much more than a bay that lets in air and light. It is a space in itself, a threshold between exterior and interior, between intimate and public. It can integrate technical elements – heating, lighting -, storage, a seat, a deep doorway to be able to stand there. Complemented by shutters, net curtains, curtains, the window is an inhabited decor that signals the spirit of an era, a culture and a society. In urban housing with minimal surfaces, the window must play a new role in the daily life of the inhabitants, provided that it operates a shift from the ordinary control. »