ArchiLab, 5th Orléans International Architectural Conference. Two days of Meetings.
11-12 June 2003
Conference Centre, Orléans. Admission free.

Two days of meetings have been programmed by Marie-Ange Brayer, Director of the FRAC Centre and Frédéric Migayrou, Chief Curator of the Architecture and Design Departments, MNAM-CCI , Centre Pompidou). The first day of round tables will bring together some thirty international teams of architects who have taken part in previous ArchiLab conferences. Day two will include lectures from a dozen international curators and critics, dealing with the collection concept in its relationship to the history and current state of architectural production.

11 June 2003 : The Challenges of architecture today

The first day of meetings will be a sort of summary of the first four ArchiLab conferences, from 1999 to 2002, raising the issue of the challenges of architecture today.
In 1999, the first Conference posed the question of the changes occurring in the architect's profession, the diversification of his area of competence, and the need for architects to reappropriate programmes.
In 2000, UrbaLab broached new urban phenomena, in the age of globalization: how to encompass the dynamics of urban flows, the architecture of networks criss-crossing the world today.
In 2001, ArchiLab dealt with new lifestyles, between standardization and individualization. How are architects proposing new forms of habitat? More than 100 different projects were on view, produced by 90 international teams.
In 2002, the focus was the notion of environment (technological, natural, cultural) with "Earth Economics". How to produce alternative nature, resources and territories? How does architecture fit in to an evolving dimension, which is economic in the fullest sense of the term, in which people are producing processes rather than objects?

During these four years, some 300 international architects and critics had a chance to meet in Orleans and take part in the Conferences. In 2002, a first symposium on Architectural Criticism involved some twenty critics.

------The Futures of the Modern 10h-11h15
Moderator : Frédéric Migayrou
Architects : Taeg Nishimoto (USA), Ian+ (I), Odile Decq (F), ezct (F), François Roche (F), Actar (SP)

All the postwar architectural tendencies are structured in a critical demarcation with regard to modern architecture. The on-going critical questioning of the principles of modernism defined the whole field of an "après- modern" which had taken on the forms and aspects of different precepts of "postmodernism". How has the theoretical discourse influenced the praxis of architects at an international level? Is it still possible, today, to abide by this hermeneutic and critical strategy of a reference to the modern at a time when the most essential conditions of a production of architecture have shifted, caught up in the industrial systems of logic of globalization and the new economics of information networks?

------In search of the architectural minimum 11h30-12h45
Moderator : Christian Girard
Architects : Didier Faustino (F), Pauhof (AU), Kengo Kuma (J), Hitoshi Abe (J), B&K+, Arno Brandlhuber(D)

Faced with a ubiquitous industrialization which has, in an extreme way, normalized all the dimensions of architectural production, from programmes to constructive principles, the architect has given way to design departments and engineering agencies. Creating a new resource from this material state of a worldwide architecture, and setting it up as a new materiality has prompted many architects to "positivize" this situation by neutralizing all aesthetic discourse on the part of the architect. Minimal architecture, poor architecture, reduced to its component parts, assemblage praxis, reduced use of standard products and materials, lower-cost architecture--what is the limit of this architecture of withdrawal, of this praxis of saying "less", and of disappearance?

------An architecture of flow 14h30-15h45
Moderator : Philippe-Marie Morel
Architects : KolMac (USA), Decoi (F), Oosterhuis (NL), Asymptote (USA), dZO (F), Servo (USA), Kovac (AUS), Ocean UK (UK)

What was the nature of the swing of the industrial world into the world of information, networks, and technological, computer flows? How has this situation managed to change the logic of the project, by deterritorializing architecture? From the digital file to the machine, from object to city, digital systems will, in a limitless way, condition the actual economics of architectural design and production, forming a new space-time, the territory of an architecture caught by exchange and flows, a field where architecture has shifted into the field of the simultaneous.

------The architect's areas of practice 16h-17h15
Modérateur : Andreas Ruby
Architectes : Dominique Lyon (F), Juergen Mayer (D), Jakob+MacFarlane (F), Dagmar Richter (D), Périphériques (F), Emergent Design (USA)

After the issues raised by the first three round tables, the state of architecture today will be broached, by way of the definition of the architect's areas of practice. After the apotheosis of the commission, and the boom in symbolic buildings during the 1980s, what, today, is the architect's place in relation to those organizing commissions? How can he still preserve the terrain of his own praxis, between individual and collective commission? Is the architect still capable of acting on the urban organization, or is he/she being marginalized by the industrial logic of construction?

12 June 2003 : Memory and topicality of architecture... after the "end of history"
2nd Symposium on architectural criticism

The second day of meetings will being together ten curators and critics in the form of lectures, which will question the dialectic between the memory of architecture and its current state. What is the place of history in architecture collections ? How do they incorporate the latest work? What, today, does the end of history mean?
In the morning, people in charge of architecture collections will talk, broaching the dimension of the project in architecture, between conception and conservation.
In the afternoon, internationally renowned historians and critics will talk on historical fields such as radical architecture, and try to define their approach to the latest situation with regard to architectural production.

9h30-10h : Bart Lootsma, Critique d'architecture, Commisaire d'Archilab 2004
10h-10h30 : Joseph Rosa, conservateur en chef du département architecture, Musée d'Art Moderne, San Francisco (SFMOMA)
10h30-11h : Mirko Zardini, Conservateur, Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal
Pause
11h30-12h : Ingeborg Flagge, directrice Deutsches Architektur Museum, Francfort
12h- 12h30 : Marie-Ange Brayer, directrice du FRAC Centre, Orléans

14h30-15h : Andrea Branzi (I), Historien, Critique d'architecture
15h-15h30 : Mark Wigley (USA), Critique d'architecture et Professeur à la Colombia University, New York
15h30-16h : Detlef Mertins (CA), Critique d'architecture, et Professeur à la Faculté
Pause
16h30-17h : Georges Teyssot (CAN), Critique d'architecture, et Professeur à l'Université de Laval, Québec
17h-17h30 : Frédéric Migayrou (F), Conservateur en chef des services Architecture et Design, MNAM-CCI, Centre Pompidou
17h30 : Entretien : Dominique Perrault (F), architecte et Frédéric Migayrou (F)

Production : City of Orléans

ArchiLab contact : Christelle Lecoeur
Tel : 00 33 (0)2 38 53 06 16
christelle@archilab.org