On the occasion of our the spring semester devoted to the exploration of the Sea, Jacques Rougerie will meet with the the students of Confluence and address the challenges of this fascinating liquid territory.
You’re welcome to follow the lecture online : https://zoom.us/j/91786815829
JACQUES ROUGERIE
Visionary architect, Member of the Institute is passionate about the sea and space. He has based his research and achievements for more than 30 years on a bionic architecture based on biomimicry, a real bridge between living forms and built forms, taking into account in particular the precepts of sustainable development.
His forward-looking vision and his taste for new technologies allow him to offer a better integration of the habitat into the natural environment, especially marine, so that the people who live there can join.
In this sense he draws his inspiration both from the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci and from his faith in human genius. In this spirit, he built underwater habitats, vessels with transparent hulls, underwater museums, sea, scientific, technical and cultural centers, sports and leisure facilities, hotels, and airport and industrial facilities. in France and internationally. He thus brings together his passions, the sea, space and biomimetic architecture.
Experiencing his own achievements as a true explorer of the underwater world, he has gone so far as to live several times in underwater habitats, notably participating in the world record for 69 days under the sea in the United States. Its projects, SeaOrbiter and the Cité des Mériens, are the synthesis of more than 30 years of innovative research in the fields of marine and underwater architecture.
Also always inspired by the work of Jules Verne, he adopted the maxim: “Whatever a man is able to imagine, other men will be able to achieve it”. To transmit his passions and encourage young people at the international level to be daring to build our future, he created the Jacques Rougerie Foundation, Génération Espace Mer at the Institut de France.
“It is from the ocean and space that the fate of future civilizations will be born”
Odile Decq is the guest of the tenth episode of the Hors concours podcast. An opportunity for the architect to review the significant developments of the past 30 years and to share his vision of education and the place of women in architecture.
An hour of relaxed conversation to give voice to one of those who make the city today. Each month, in this podcast, an architect tells his story through his journey, his work and his vision of architecture.
We carry with us the memory of Mary Vaughan Jonhson, friend and regular visiting-professor of Confluence. Mary joined our adventure since its beginning in 2014 and was a strong and joyful support of our school. All our thoughts goes to her family and to all the students that had the chance to meet her contagious enthusiasm.
Confluence Institute is proud to share its Spring 2021 Inaugural lecture that took place on Tuesday March 2nd, 2021.
How to join CONFLUENCE ?
CONFLUENCE has its own recruitment process outside of “Parcours sup”, the national education platform. Confluence therefore autonomously manages the admission schedule and the selection of students.
The timetable of the procedure is published at the beginning of the semester for the following semester.
CONFLUENCE is one of the only school of architecture to offer two entries a year, one in autumn, beginning of September, and one in spring, beginning of February.
What are the selection criteria to join CONFLUENCE?
The selection to join Confluence Institute is based on file (letter of motivation, CV …), portfolio and video in which the candidate presents itself and exposes its motivations.
Unlike traditional French schools, Confluence does not conduct individual interviews to allow foreign students to apply on the same basis as French students.
In case of doubt from the school, a direct interview may be requested.
71% of our planet is Ocean.
It represents 361 Million km2 and contains 1,33 Billion m3 of water. It is regulating climate on Earth. Without it the temperature of the atmosphere would be 35° higher
The human body is made of 70% of water and the composition of its plasma is very close to the composition of the sea. The Ocean provides all the water humans are drinking, half of their oxygen and one fifth of their proteins.
For a long time, the economic, politic, social and cultural power was in the hands of those who mastered the Ocean. By controlling the oceans, Empires were controlling the world from their harbors and gave birth to great civilizations (Venetian, Flemish, Genoese, Dutch, English, American, Chinese) and their cities whether they be real, legendary or submerged.
Moreover, most of the innovations mainly came from the sea, whether it be ideas or goods. Today, as nine out of ten goods, communication or data travels through the Ocean, it has become, more than ever, the place of the geopolitical debate.
Indeed, till today, more than 50% of humanity is living on the 100km wide frontier between oceans and inner lands. How will these human settlements face the rise of the sea level and the profound transformation of the ocean coasts?
Furthermore, the climate change and the continuous population growth will inevitably force us to change or relationship with this unknown liquid continent. It is already facing major climate and political challenges and will undoubtedly play an important role in the survival of humanity.
With the collaboration of Odile Decq, Nicolas Hannequin, Jieun Kim, Nicolas Floch’, Didier Faustino, Marc Van Peteghem, Jacques Rougerie, Christian Buchet, Bruno Dehan and Gaetan Kohler, the students of Confluence will spend the Spring semester working and researching on this new territory: Going in, travelling on, living in, over and inside, protecting it, establishing new settlements…
Confluence Institute is happy to present the publication of our close friends and professors Aaron Sprecher and Chandler Ahrens. The book explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture.
With the contribution of : Georges Teyssot, Antoine Picon, Mark Linder, Dana Cupkova, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Viola Ago, John Carpenter, Nicholas de Monchaux, Martin Bressani, Volkan Alkanoglu, Thom Mayne, Alvin Huang, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Alessandra Ponte, Laurent Stalder, Satoru Sugihara, Greg Lynn, Tom Shaked and Uri Dublin, Jose Sanchez, and Theodora Vardouli.
Confluence Institute hosted a series of online lectures during the first lockdown of 2020. Here is the link to the event that took place on Wednesday May 17th, 2020.
Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary “deep structures” of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. Whereas Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la Curiosité d’un classique (1988) traces the origin of these changes at the end of the seventeenth century, L’Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992) envisages their full development from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1850s. Picon has also worked on the relations between society, technology and utopia. This is in particular the theme of Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), a detailed study of the Saint-Simonian movement that played a seminal role in the emergence of industrial modernity. Picon’s most recent books offer a comprehensive overview of the changes brought by the computer and digital culture to the theory and practice of architecture as well as to the planning and experience of the city. He has published in particular Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: Théorie et Critique d’un Idéal Autoréalisateur (2013), and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015).
Picon has received a number of awards for his writings, including the Médaille de la Ville de Paris and twice the Prix du Livre d’Architecture de la Ville de Briey, a well as the Georges Sarton Medal of the University of Gand. In 2010, he was elected a member of the French Académie des Technologies. He is Chevalier des Arts et Lettres since 2014. He is also Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier.
Picon received science and engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, and a PhD in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
The Biological Laboratory of Architecture and Sensitive Technologies [BLAST] is a group founded in 2018 with the aim of exploring the possible relationships between new technologies and living things in order to develop new processes of artistic and architectural creation. Digital design and manufacturing tools are at the heart of the studio’s experiments in design, scenography and architecture projects. Blast Studio develops a research to explore new ways to bring nature and technology into dialogue. Inspired by nature we created a new ecosystem in the city, where we recycle urban waste into outstanding sustainable objects and furniture thanks to living organisms.
Faced with the exponential volume of waste, these three architects have the idea of transforming it, using technology, in order to build responsibly and sustainably. The adventure begins in a kitchen, with the impression of mycelium using a 3D printer. In 2019, they acquire expertise in the Open Cell center during their stay in London, where they subsequently decide to set up their premises. The waste is crushed there, sterilized then mixed with fungi which digest their organic matter. Once in paste form, a 3D printer transforms them into a work of art, furniture or sustainable architecture. Their project in 2021 is to build a pavilion, the first step towards the dream of a city made of its own waste.
https://www.blast-studio.com
This week long event is the exhibition of a selected individual, young and promising, developing a discourse challenging our contemporary world.
Between Monday, 16th December 2019 and Thursday, 19th December 2019:
Sarah Lou Maarek, a young architect and artist, will occupy our exhibition space, located at the 11 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003, Paris.
Titled ‘From Furby with Love’ this Wild Card echoes Marshall McLuhan famous affirmation: “ We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us ”.
Using tools spanning from Visual Arts to Architecture, Sarah Lou Maarek is questioning the Y Generation relationship to Intelligent Machines.
In this exhibition, the Furby – a toy with which her generation grew up with – becomes symptomatic of our relation to the so-called smart objects and technologies.
She tries to answer the too often overlooked question:
“ Why do I sometimes speak to my computer ? ”.
While highlighting our trust in digital entities such as Alexa, Siri or Bixby, she questions our gaze on these personified technologies.
Who is the master ? Who is truly the slave ?
In a context by definition binary, she outlines a third option: the Doll, incarnation of all our digital fantasies and disorders. This – so far unachieved – entity inhabits a speculative world, oscillating between paradoxes: reality and fiction, dream and nightmare, subjection and emancipation, utopia and dystopia; rendering the possibility of a cohabitation between flesh and data, emotions and codes.
Join us at the 11 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003, Paris.
If our address changes:
Confluence Institute
11 rue des Arquebusiers
75003, Paris – France
Our commitment remains the same:
To further question the teaching of Architecture through an alternative pedagogy.
Don’t hesitate to follow our latest news and the daily lives of our students on Instagram and Facebook:
@confluence_institute
To contact us by email:
contact@confluence.eu
Or by phone:
+33 (0) 1 43 37 74 11
Intensive workshop with Andrea Blum
April 15th to April 19th 2019
Let’s imagine we could do it over again…………………………………………
What would you want your new world to look like?
How would you change the way you live?
How would you eat, dress, navigate, socialize?
How would you form your community?
Bugs & Birds / Flora & Fauna / When in Doubt Look to Nature
This workshop is dedicated to learning from an example: How we can use the model of another life
form/species to serve as a model for humans to rejuvenate how they live now, and how they will live on the Moon in the future?
Example: the spittlebug lives inside a cluster of bubbles; the sea spider gets oxygen through its pores; the hermit crab finds the right size shell for a home, and the bee builds communal architecture …
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
Intensive workshop with Chandler Ahrens
The intensive one-week workshop focuses on advancing the Moon Village studio project lead by Tom Shaked and Aaron Sprecher. The goal is to advance the design to incorporate building systems that reinforce the architectural concept of each project.
The Moon Village project creates several difficult questions that must be addressed from technical issues to the quality of spaces for habitation. The workshop will focus on advancing the designs the initial designs to address issues of materiality, construction techniques, structure, air, water, light in addition to how people use the spaces for living. The architecture of space stations, space ships, and proposed long-term habitation require very tight integration of building systems with the use of the spaces. As with architecture on earth, building systems are the primary material to design with and must reinforce conceptual ideas.
The objective of the course is to develop innovative design strategies to that acknowledge that buildings are complex interrelationships of systems that must coalesce at multiple scales in relation to the architectural concept and comfort of the human body.
Design strategies must opportunistically negotiate and synthesize these complex relationships including structure, material behavior, solar heat gain, internal heat gains, heat loss through the façade, daylight levels, artificial lighting, ventilation, acoustics, and safety.
The complex interrelations of building systems that cannot fail require an integrative approach with the design concept.
Workshop with Romain Viricel, Designer
March 25th to March 29th, 2019
Since the dawn of time, Man has used, manufactured, and adapted to his environment to evolve and live in the latter.
35,000 years ago in the Jura Swabian, a group of Man pierced holes in a bird’s bone of a few centimeters, it is the birth of a flute, the birth of music.
When the man went into space, he created new objects or transformed existing ones, to respond to a new environment, a new need with other constraints.
The Space Pen, the Lunar Rover, the travel golden recorder, the falling astronaut, the dragon crew, when the engineers of the space X program development projects, they draw at the same time the evolution, the adaptability, think about the technologies to the ergonomics and manufacturing but also to dreams and craze
During this workshop week, students will have to rethink the use of an object or a piece of furniture for extra-terrestrial use.
Repeating either an earthed object adapted and redrawn for space or a fully imagined object responding to a new need. The final object will be built on a 1: 1 gray cardboard scale.
The semester studio projects will serve as background and environment for the objects drawn during this week of the workshop.
It will be necessary to pay particular attention to the drawing, to its lines, its form, its ergonomics, to the relation with the body but also, of course, to the new constraints of the environment.
After 5 years in Lyon, CONFLUENCE opens a new chapter in its history.
From September 2019, the school will be based in the center of Paris. and will continue its commitments: to further question the teaching of Architecture through an alternative pedagogy.
We have built together, a unique and singular training, a network of international contacts, and for each student, a personalized course that goes well beyond a professional education.
Establishing school in Paris is a new adventure and an important step in the development of CONFLUENCE. We would be happy to build future collaborations and continue to foster a new generation of architect together
{UN}BLINKING MACHINE, GYGES ‘ESCAPE
Smart technologies, smart cities… We are becoming the focal point of a global panopticon. In a world obsessed by our identities, how can we make a place for the outstanding?
Project by Maxime Baudoncq with distinction DIGITAL CULTURES
STATE OF NEGOTIATION
Project by Joséphine Bourat with distinction TECHNOLOGICAL SPECULATION
• Odile Decq, Architect and founder of CONFLUENCE, thesis advisor
• Aaron Sprecher, Architect, and Professor at Technion University in Tel Aviv
• Nicolas Hannequin, Architect, teacher and thesis advisor
• Lionel Lemire, Architect, and teacher at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture
• Jacques Sautereau, Architect, urbanist, and teacher at CONFLUENCE
• Tom Shaked, a Ph.D. student at Technion University and a teacher at CONFLUENCE
• Charles Ober, Architect graduated from CONFLUENCE
• Domitille Roy, Architect graduated from CONFLUENCE
Key Dates for admission fall semester 2019
• Before March 15th / Application fees: 0 €
• Before May, 15th / Application fees: 100 €
• After May 15th / Application fees: 200 €
Why choose CONFLUENCE?
Based on an evolving and radical understanding of research, experimentation, and trans-disciplinarity, the Institute proposes:
• To construct an unparalleled understanding of architecture at the encounter of disciplines
• To cross prospective and experimental visions
• To create an appetite for engagement
• To generate unpredicted alternatives
• To resist the uniformization of production and imposed standards
• To go beyond the implicit limits of architecture, in order to create unimaginable opportunities.
CONFLUENCE is an educational approach that is open, alternative, international, collaborative and innovative, moving towards a hopeful and forward-looking architecture for the 21st century
Intensive workshop with Aaron Sprecher – February 15th to February 19th
Space inhabitation requires a new understanding of architecture and living conditions
Eating, sleeping, and working are here activities that take place in a singular spatial system while new forms of psychology are required in order to sustain life away from planet Earth.
This design studio comes to examine current intellectual and practical directions in the study of design for living in outer space.
The goal of the design studio will be to advance ideas in terms of populating space with a human community while exploring the advanced building and digital technologies. Our design team will collect the various proposals and create a new residential satellite for planet Earth.
Each team will choose a specific location on the moon. The team will report on the local features of this location, both in terms of resources and reachability. The second phase of our research will focus on the building of an architectural intervention using the fabrication principles developed in the previous workshop of Tom Shaked and Karen Lee Bar-Sinai.
From February 8th to February 15th, 2019
As part of “Moon Village ” studio, Tom Shaked and Karen Lee Bar-Sinai will teach an intensive workshop in order to explore the potential for ground-scaping of the lunar surface as a foundation for extraterrestrial architecture.
The advancements in robotic fabrication are bringing about new ways to craft materials.
In this context, robotic tools can help establish a long-lost art of ‘scaping’ earth-based matter through applying in-situ digital manufacturing to natural and remote terrains.
Thus, in the context of lunar construction, the robotic tool thus becomes a mediating link between the architect and the distant matter.
The workshop will explore this form of robotic scaping of large-scale environments through applying traditional craft techniques on the sand-based matter, and its shaping to the desired form using a hybrid of formative, subtractive and additive digital techniques.