Ecole Speciale d'Architecture
254, Boulevard Raspail, 75014 Paris
tel 33(0)1 40 47 40 47

Fall semester 2008 : The LONDON PROGRAMME

Paris and London are nowadays so close and similar in certain fundamental ways (size and national role) but quite different in attitude and habit. The River Seine has a very different dimension to the Thames and the role played by ‘locality’ is more ambiguous and complex in London. The architectural community in London is more international and the student there tends to respond to a wider set of parameters and design more thoroughly - and this is what we want you to do in our Studio. We hope also that the drawings of Lim and Woods can act as an inspiration.
The medieval London Bridge carried houses on it and in 1996 the Royal Academy held the exhibition ‘Living Bridges’ in which many projects from known architects, including Zaha Hadid and Future Systems, were shown. The subject offers scope for the exploration of dynamics, structures, form and a way of re-thinking the city.

Sunday 28 September 2008



2 comments:

Atelier Peter Cook / Caroline Rabourdin said...

BENITA TAN
Somehow, Benita has sussed-out a particularity of the English psychology : they love the third-raste evidence of a wish-dream in an unlikely spot. So instead of taking a bus to a POROPER beach, they’’ get all excited with a patch of estuary that COULD be a beach. A rich seam of mixture of observation/circumstance/’whistling in the dark’/ opportunism : it requires WIT to exploit a really good scheme out of the situation : but if successful it can be a winner !
PC

Atelier Peter Cook / Caroline Rabourdin said...

BENITA TAN
Benita has a good instinct for digging-out witty or provocative information. Therefore I look forward to her extension of this with first in the grouping of these pieces of observation together and
second in the extrapolation of them towards design proposals.
The ‘desperateness’ that leads to the making of an artificial beach is a fascinating territory : perhaps along the lines of ‘ mock Italian’
Restaurants, ‘mock New York’ bars, also, in London ‘REAL OLD” and “MOCK OLD”….the dungeons or the pubs. If we have a Thames berach, how far do we go to make it feel also ‘authentic’ as a beach ?
So will Benita be a specialist on the ersaz ?