>ArchiLab / UrbaLab

ArchiLab 99 brought together a wide range of international architects belonging to the same generation, and accordingly defined the shared claim of an "actual" architecture. This aim crystallized during the various discussions into a shared desire to no longer lose any sleep over an aesthetic definition of architecture, "Where is architecture?", but evincing far more a concern for its effectiveness, by raising, with Taeg Nishimoto, the issue of the architectural and urban event-a "When is architecture?" . Architecture must regain its thorough capacity for intervention, and to do as much it must be restructured by grabbing hold of every possible type of syntax, context and means of production. Its sphere of action is an urban domain conceived of as a planetary continuity, a shared arena moulded by the laws of globalization. ArchiLab 2000 will be inviting 30 new teams to exhibit in Orléans, but it will also be including the 30 architects who attended ArchiLab 1999. As a forum for meetings between architects, UrbaLab will offer a chance to discuss comparative urban intervention strategies, on the one hand, and, on the other, not only the economic and political rules and regulations of globalization, but also this common, worldwide culture which, over and above any form of internationalism, is formulating its own list of contents and a new cultural community. Withstanding all forms of sociologism, the quantitative diagnoses of academic city-planning, and the reification of the various forms of contextualism, ArchiLab/UrbaLab will embark upon a brand of pragmatics that is directed wholly at the exchange of projects, the elaboration of an interventionist architecture, the definition of means, and an architecture geared towards demand rather than commissions. ArchiLab/UrbaLab will thus be questioning the plurality of urban phenomena--cities and their forms of morphogenesis rather than "the city", cities understood in the fabric of an global urbanization, This pooling of experience and praxis will draw up the obvious lines of an "actual" architecture that is constantly renewing its means, whose formal expression is merely a state of on-going change.

Marie-Ange Brayer

Frédéric Migayrou