capital(s) issue grand scale metropolises

capital(s) issue -grand-scale- metropolises

capital(s) issue -grand-scale- metropolises symposium at centre pompidou, paris october 1-2, 2009

the two days symposium ‘capital(s) issue -grand-scale- metropolises’ at the centre pompidou in paris is featuring the prominent architects: pier vittorio aureli, peter eisenmann, luca galofaro, vittorio gregotti, bernard tschumi, andrea branzi, adriaan geuze, neven sidor, james wines, ken yeang, hernan diaz alonso, ben van berkel, theodore spyropoulos and usuke obuchi, makoto sei watanabe, alejandro zaera-polo, rem koolhaas, kengo kuma , brendan macfarlane, thom mayne and dominique perrault.

all debates are held at the grande salle of the centre pompidou. free entrance, limited seating available.

to subscribe to the two-day symposium on 1st and 2nd october, you can enter your e-mail in a form published on the website http://metropoles.centrepompidou.fr

live video conference are to be viewed over  the internet and in the french national schools of architecture.

october 1st, 2009 / 9.30am to 1pm

speakers: pier vittorio aureli of dogma peter eisenmann http://www.eisenmanarchitects.com luca galofaro of ian+ http://www.ianplus.it vittorio gregotti http://www.gregottiassociati.it bernard tschumi http://www.tschumi.com

memories of the future

a structuralist framework the post-war period posed the crucial question of historic cities and their future facing modernist conceptions of planned development.

the historicist vision of the tendenza advocated by aldo rossi led to the updating of typo-morphological schemas and paved the way to a structuralist understanding of urban integration, and then to the large-scale territorial models developed by vittorio gregotti or oswald mathias ungers. the idea of a factory of the city, of a structural semantics, enriched the syntactical representations of urban forms, engendering new thinking about complexity and leading to the more overtly semantic and phenomenological approach originated by peter eisenman. a morphological understanding began to supersede the abstraction of the modern plan.

october 1st, 2009 / 2.30pm to 6pm

speakers: andrea branzi http://www.andreabranzi.it adriaan geuze of west 8 http://www.west8.nl neven sidor of grimshaw architects http://www.grimshaw-architects.com james wines of site http://www.siteenvirodesign.com ken yeang of t.r. hamzah & yeang http://www.trhamzahyeang.com

urban ecosophies in a few short years the concept of biomass has become a permanent referent of any architectural project, on the one hand technicized and politicized through the ‘sustainable’ label and on the other hand popularized through the extreme greening of some projects. therefore, it seems relevant to review the basic premises underlying its meaning. the concept of green architecture has a history, with its often misunderstood heroes. this history intersects the one involving issues of overpopulation, density and the general economy of resources. the 1970s saw the beginnings of alternative architecture, which sought different economies based on self-construction and simple principles (earthen architecture, or architecture built with salvaged materials, and running on alternatives energy sources).

october 2nd, 2009 / 9.30am to 1pm speakers: hernan diaz alonso of xefirotarch http://www.trhamzahyeang.com ben van berkel of un studio http://www.unstudio.com theodore spyropoulos and usuke obuchi of aadrl http://www.aadrl.net makoto sei watanabe http://www.makoto-architect.com alejandro zaera-polo of foa http://www.f-o-a.net

morphogenetic perspectives although the notion of the urban body originated with mechanistic visions of the 17th and 18th centuries, the contemporary concept of a city in perpetual mutation sustained by networks tapping into quantitative and qualitative domains has reactivated the development of an organicistic description.the japanese metabolists, against the mechanistic vision of the city and considering the urban domain as a machine, instead imagined the city as a living body, a perpetually mutating organism in which transformations were to be thought of as implants or hybridizations. what for the metabolists was still a metaphorical approach has since become an essential tool for understanding the self-regulating phenomena emerging in major urban concentrations.

october 2nd, 2009 / 2.30pm to 6pm

speakers: rem koolhaas of office for metropolitan architecture (oma – amo) http://www.oma.nl kengo kuma http://www.kkaa.co.jp brendan macfarlane of jakob + macfarlane http://www.jakobmacfarlane.com thom mayne of morphos http://www.morphosis.com dominique perrault http://www.perraultarchitecte.com

limits of generic chaos the expansion of cities, the multiplication of heterogeneous networks, of hybridizations and the emergence of parallel economies have led to the growth of urban systems that are increasingly beyond control._the rationalist model of planning seems to have failed in the face of western cities that are now entirely in the grip of the logic of consumption and in the face of the megacities forming in emerging countries as well. these urban conflagrations that no longer seem to follow any economic or sociallogic are nevertheless revealing unsuspected generic capacities for modeling urban concentrations. the acceptance of what exists induces the inclusion of the disqualified, infrastructure and usage as elementary programmatic functions.