>City planning and globalization

ArchiLab is the umbrella name for the City of Orléans International Architectural Conference. This event is intended above all as a platform and forum for meetings and discussion, as well as a venue for exhibitions and round tables.

ArchiLab 1999 brought together in Orléans some thirty teams of architects belonging to an upcoming generation, hailing from a dozen different countries, and all involved in research and forward-looking projects. The focus of the conference was a 16,000 square foot exhibition and several days of meetings. The emphasis was laid fairly and squarely on the status and language of the architect.

ArchiLab 2000 will bring together thirty new teams, from France and abroad, around an exhibition which will show their projects, be they experimental or actually built.

This year, ArchiLab 2000 will be encompassing UrbaLab, a programme of round tables and a forum day, focusing on new urban strategies taken at the scale of globalization, understood on both the economic and cultural levels. To this end, the thirty ArchiLab 1999 teams will be invited to dialogue with the thirty ArchiLab 2000 architects, offering a pluralist view of current urban and architectural research.

>2nd Orléans International Architectural Conference

ArchiLab's aim is to be a forum for exchanges between French and foreign architects, and between architects and project developers and contracting authorities. ArchiLab 1999 focused on issues linked with the architect's changing profession, the diversification of his skills, and the reappropriation of programmes; ArchiLab/UrbaLab 2000 will be more broadly open to the complex issues of today's city planning, to analysing a wide range of urban phenomena on a worldwide scale, and to the answers and responses likely to be given by the architect's present.

UrbaLab, which will take the form of four days of discussions, each one putting forward its approach to such urban issues, will, for the first time, and in the presence of 60 teams of architects, lay out the various problems associated the city and with globalization, calling upon the most forward looking teams in the field of research architecture to come up with new proposals, and a more diversified analytical capacity when it comes to the question of urban complexity. These discussions will be organized by ten critics (five of whom were in attendance last year) representing a broad range of very different research approaches and methods. A catalogue offering each of the 60 architect teams a four-page spread in which to define their understanding of city planning will be published (quite separately from the ArchiLab 2000 catalogue) giving an overview of contemporary urban approaches.