3e rencontres internationales d'Orléans

•ArchiLab is intended as a platform for meetings and exchanges between French and foreign architects, and between architects and developers. Since 1999, Archilab has become an international meeting-point for current, forward-looking architecture, focusing on challenges to architectural praxis.

ArchiLab 1999 concentrated on issues to do with changes in the architect's profession, the diversification of architects' skills, and the reappropriation of programmes. Thirty teams from a dozen countries were exhibited, and took part in the various meetings, which were also attended by international critics.
ArchiLab 2000, with the UrbaLab Symposium, turned its attention to questions of urbanness, and analysed new urban phenomena on a worldwide scale. Thirty new teams were exhibited, and all the sixty architects exhibited in 1999 and 2000 were invited to take part in round tables.

ArchiLab 2001 will focus on the issue of housing. What do housing living in houses mean today? How are architects proposing and responding to new forms of housing and inhabiting? So as to offer a very broad raft of approaches, 90 housing projects designed by 90 different teams will be on view. Apart from one or two names from earlier generations, it is mostly young architects, hailing from 18 countries, who will come and present their research.

A scientific selection committee, made up of European architectural critics, including some of the most groundbreaking in terms of architectural research - Manuel Gausa (SP), Christian Girard (F), Bart Lootsma (NL), Frédéric Migayrou (F), Andreas Ruby (D) - emphasizes the pluralism that is part and parcel of the ArchiLab approach.
How are individual wishes and desires to be taken into account, and how are collective ways of living to be individualized? and how is industrial production to be used to create unusual and specific proposals? Production methods are being rethought so as to end up producing convertible, multi-purpose housing, at times the outcome of a combined approach based on generative models. Interactive programmes, individualizing the home within a "standard" form of production, are also being explored.
Some architects are incorporating the dimension of the context and setting as a pre-condition of their approach to housing and habitat. Others are remodelling the territory, so as to develop multiple additional functional aspects within it, thus managing density in a new way. Precariousness, urgency and the need for temporary housing may prompt solutions leading to a "reversible colonization of the territory" (M. Gausa)

•For its third conference, Archilab will include:
• An exhibition of 90 housing projects by 90 teams of architects, with supporting contributions from a handful of artists, invited to express their own way of looking at housing.
• Two days of round tables, bringing together the participating teams and critics, on this theme.
One of the abandoned Houses of Detroit, retrieved by Kyong Park and the ICUE (International Center for Urban Ecology), will be on view in the courtyard, like a frontispiece to the exhibition. "Building on Ashes" without nostalgia, here involving a new urban community, as well as a new living community, thus recovering one of the basic principles of architecture.

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