CAPITAL(S) ISSUE - GRAND SCALE METROPOLISES

capital(s) issue -grand-scale- metropolises
symposium at centre pompidou, paris
october 1-2, 2009

the two days symposium 'capital(s) issue -grand-scale- metropolises' at
the centre pompidou in paris is featuring the prominent architects:
pier vittorio aureli, peter eisenmann, luca galofaro, vittorio gregotti, bernard tschumi,
andrea branzi, adriaan geuze, neven sidor, james wines, ken yeang, hernan diaz alonso,
ben van berkel, theodore spyropoulos and usuke obuchi, makoto sei watanabe,
alejandro zaera-polo, rem koolhaas, kengo kuma , brendan macfarlane, thom mayne
and dominique perrault.

all debates are held at the grande salle of the centre pompidou. free entrance, limited
seating available.

to subscribe to the two-day symposium on 1st and 2nd october, you can enter your
e-mail in a form published on the website http://metropoles.centrepompidou.fr

live video conference are to be viewed over the internet and in the french national
schools of architecture.

speakers:
pier vittorio aureli of dogma
peter eisenmann http://www.eisenmanarchitects.com
luca galofaro of ian+ http://www.ianplus.it
vittorio gregotti http://www.gregottiassociati.it
bernard tschumi http://www.tschumi.com

memories of the future

a structuralist framework
the post-war period posed the crucial question of historic cities and their future facing
modernist conceptions of planned development.

the historicist vision of the tendenza advocated by aldo rossi led to the updating of
typo-morphological schemas and paved the way to a structuralist understanding of urban
integration, and then to the large-scale territorial models developed by vittorio gregotti or
oswald mathias ungers. the idea of a factory of the city, of a structural semantics, enriched
the syntactical representations of urban forms, engendering new thinking about complexity
and leading to the more overtly semantic and phenomenological approach originated
by peter eisenman. a morphological understanding began to supersede the abstraction
of the modern plan.

speakers:
andrea branzi http://www.andreabranzi.it
adriaan geuze of west 8 http://www.west8.nl
neven sidor of grimshaw architects http://www.grimshaw-architects.com
james wines of site http://www.siteenvirodesign.com
ken yeang of t.r. hamzah & yeang http://www.trhamzahyeang.com

urban ecosophies
in a few short years the concept of biomass has become a permanent referent of any
architectural project, on the one hand technicized and politicized through the 'sustainable'
label and on the other hand popularized through the extreme greening of some projects.
therefore, it seems relevant to review the basic premises underlying its meaning. the concept
of green architecture has a history, with its often misunderstood heroes. this history intersects
the one involving issues of overpopulation, density and the general economy of resources.
the 1970s saw the beginnings of alternative architecture, which sought different economies
based on self-construction and simple principles (earthen architecture, or architecture built
with salvaged materials, and running on alternatives energy sources).

speakers:
hernan diaz alonso of xefirotarch http://www.trhamzahyeang.com
ben van berkel of un studio http://www.unstudio.com
theodore spyropoulos and usuke obuchi of aadrl http://www.aadrl.net
makoto sei watanabe http://www.makoto-architect.com
alejandro zaera-polo of foa http://www.f-o-a.net


morphogenetic perspectives
although the notion of the urban body originated with mechanistic visions of the 17th
and 18th centuries, the contemporary concept of a city in perpetual mutation sustained
by networks tapping into quantitative and qualitative domains has reactivated the development
of an organicistic description.the japanese metabolists, against the mechanistic vision of the city
and considering the urban domain as a machine, instead imagined the city as a living body,
a perpetually mutating organism in which transformations were to be thought of as implants or hybridizations. what for the metabolists was still a metaphorical approach has since become
an essential tool for understanding the self-regulating phenomena emerging in major urban concentrations.

speakers:
rem koolhaas of office for metropolitan architecture (oma – amo) http://www.oma.nl
kengo kuma http://www.kkaa.co.jp
brendan macfarlane of jakob + macfarlane http://www.jakobmacfarlane.com
thom mayne of morphos http://www.morphosis.com
dominique perrault http://www.perraultarchitecte.com


limits of generic chaos
the expansion of cities, the multiplication of heterogeneous networks, of hybridizations
and the emergence of parallel economies have led to the growth of urban systems that are
increasingly beyond control._the rationalist model of planning seems to have failed in
the face of western cities that are now entirely in the grip of the logic of consumption
and in the face of the megacities forming in emerging countries as well. these urban
conflagrations that no longer seem to follow any economic or sociallogic are nevertheless
revealing unsuspected generic capacities for modeling urban concentrations. the acceptance
of what exists induces the inclusion of the disqualified, infrastructure and usage as elementary programmatic functions.