The growing of natural fibres ‐ such as wicker ‐ is deeply virtuous: it helps to diversify the forest cover, itrequires limited inputs ??? even in water, little maintenance, and its CO2 emissions are minimal. Their uses in basketry date back to the Neolithic period, and even probably before. People around the world have employed braiding technics and basketry craft to design a large panel of objects, clothes, furniture, boats, etc. In the field of architecture and construction, we can identify natural fibre uses in numerous of vernacular shelters, but they are generally limited to non-structural filling elements. The scarcity of mechanical characterization of wicker material in the literature is underlying that, since now, these kinds of materials are not commonly used to a structural purpose. The aim of our research is to demonstrate the feasibility to design and build structural wicker braided shells for architectural purposes, and to provide designers with the necessary tools for this process. Thanks to wicker mechanical characterization and to experimental measurements, we developed a law which defines a relation between density and orientation of the stems and the fields of principal stresses on an idealized continuous surface: “each field of stress is related to an optimal braiding”. These data have supplied an algorithm, BAYA, making design and optimization of braided shells accessible and easy to use for architects and practitioners. Even if our research focused on wicker, it should be easily adaptable to other fibres and plants as, for instance ,rattan or reed. This innovative research is demonstrated by the realization of a full-scale public pavilion hanging from trees on the belvedere of the Butte du Chapeau Rouge park (Paris XIX), and a 12.8‐meter-long footbridge for the Utopies Constructives festival in Richelieu’s Park.

The term “bioinspiration” defines a creative approach based on the observation of biological principles and transfer to design. Biomimicry is the recent approach, which describes a large field of scientific and technical activities dealing with an interdisciplinary cooperation between biology and other fields with the goal of solving practical problems addressing innovation or sustainable development. Architecture has been influenced by many aspects of natural and social sciences, among these, biology is currently blending into design activities. Bioinspiration has evolved and shifted architectural practices towards numerous innovative approaches through different bioarchitectural movements from the past until the present. However, there is a blur of biomimicry within bioinspiration in architecture between the direct copy of mere natural forms and the true understanding of biological principles, which is the pivot of sustainable development. The main challenge remains in the gap between the profound knowledge of biology, its related scientific fields and the creative process of architectural design, including cross-disciplinary collaboration between architects and biologists. This entry presents main bioarchitectural movements and how it leads to today’s biomimicry. It proposes to define biomimicry methodologies and how this approach applies to architectural design contexts through the study of existing case studies. The opportunities, challenges and the future outlook of the field will also be discussed.

Enquiries into non-anthropogenic cultural landscapes, such as marine environments, reveal unsuspected dynamics due to the resurgence ofecosophies that are alien to the globalised economy and territorialisation as a basis for appropriation and subsequent indiscriminate exploitation. Disturbed by the wanderings of geo-engineering, several regions of the world have recently touched on key arguments with points in common that could revitalise nonhuman biospheres and, in them, human ones. When considering maritime dynamics, the ocean must be seen as an entity. Following the ever-inspiringhistorical literatures of Fernand Braudel and expanding on the “mediterraneity” he formulated, we would be testing another concept involving a change in mentality of governmentality: “maritoriums”, a conceptualisation from 1970s Chilean architecture. Based on case studies, we will discuss significant examples in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Asian oceans and rivers that contribute to the current debate on.

AbstractWithin the European Union, Urban Living Labs now figure prominently in the urban governance toolbox. On the local stage, they are seen as auxiliaries that encourage citizen participation with a view to co-constructing policies designed to improve the quality of housing and the built environment. Their versatility is remarkable, and they are used both to boost new approaches to planning, such as tactical urbanism, and to renew the regeneration policies of large social housing areas. This text is the result of the SoHoLab research project and aims to provide a critical analysis of the roles and functions of Urban Living Labs as support tools for planning policies. Based on a review of the specialized literature and the work and experiments carried out within the framework of SoHoLab, it proposes an approach that strives to analyse ULLs as components of a new model of urban governance. From a critical perspective, it formulates the hypothesis that ULLs are not only tools of power aimed at promoting the empowerment of residents but also seeking to improve the legitimacy of planning policies and to impose a model of domination and forms of social control in accordance with the requirements of neoliberal city regulation.

The use of genetic algorithms as generative and performance design techniques often involves, in practice, constraint handling, which can be a complex task. Moreover, environmental simulations are computationally expensive and managing constraints can avoid wasting time on infeasible solutions. Despite these two incentives, and the benefits of an immense literature, both applied and theorical, on constrained optimization, there are only few guidelines and tools directly applicable by architects to address this issue. This paper proposes to fill this gap by identifying, classifying, and implementing different constraint management techniques available to architects. Seven methods have been tested for a highly constrained envelope design problem, consisting in the optimization of a sun-shading system. Three of them are easily replicable to different types of projects while the four others need to find a problem-specific heuristic. It appears that the second category is more efficient but implies the use of generative techniques that are more difficult to implement than parametric models.

Has the increase in social life and conviviality commonly imagined by the designers and decision-makers taken place? There are few systematic post-project evaluations of the methods and tools used to answer this question. Therefore, this article wishes to draw lessons from a housing experiment from the end of the 1970s, the Grand’Goule residence in Poitiers, the objective of which was to create a dense social life through design and means of participation. Some devices consisted in the creation of Surfaces d’Activités Partagées (SAPs, shared activities surfaces), which are common spaces where residents can intervene in both the interior design and the function of space itself. In this study, we analyze the Grand’Goule project, which has been displayed as a participative experiment, with the objective of creating a dense social life through original architectural and social devices. We use different sources (interviews of the inhabitants, project owners, and architects, alongside press articles and the architects’ archives) to dissect the practices in order to lead a retrospective analysis of the participative process, its successes and failures. We show that, as a very complex and fragile process, enabling the active participation of people in the design and use of a large-scale architectural project is far from obvious and suffers from several kinds of difficulties. We highlight the gap between initial intentions, final realizations and actual uses in the Grand’Goule project, and how it can inform every participative architectural project.

Abstract. Nowadays professionals from the Cultural Heritage field make use of Digital technology in all its diversity as a tool to conduct various type of work: archeological and architectural survey, monitoring, conservation programs, historic researches. This paper describes the first steps of a PhD research aiming at exploring the use of analog photographs from the French-Egyptian center for the study of Karnak Temples (CFEETK) in photogrammetry. The goal is to compare previous condition state of monuments in the 20th century with their contemporary condition and to introduce 3D model in correlation databases. The paper presents the context of the study and the complex of Karnak temples then the set of archives photographs that are used and how they are processed. At this stage, sets of analog photographs from the White Chapel were used in Agisoft Metashape combined with contemporary photographs to provide visuals from the condition of the monument after its restoration in 1985.

Recent research work carried out in France tends to show that calling on collectives of artists or architects to develop participatory approaches with inhabitants has become a common practice for public or private project owners. However, these interventions are still often limited to communication operations or come up against the inertia of political and professional cultures, which limits their scope. After briefly stating the circumstances that lead urban project owners in France to pay increasing attention to the skills of architectural “collectives”, this article focuses on the presentation of two experiments conducted by two of them. Articulating pedagogical and urban citizenship issues, these experiments were confronted with procedural and normative frameworks, some of which came from the world of urban production, others from the school institution. The aim of this article is to show that the coproduction of spaces that have a strong meaning for their users, but which are unthought of within strategic urban projects, can have a greater impact on the way in which the operational actors envisage their project. After summarizing the main highlights of these two experiments, this contribution discusses the lessons that can be drawn from them in terms of their implementation conditions and the extensions they may have had. From a methodological point of view, the interest of these two experiments lies in the fact that the two associations that were involved in them understood them as experiments from the outset. They thus implemented reflexive mechanisms involving researchers, of which this article is one of the concrete results.

Abstract. The École des Mines de Saint-Étienne possesses an important collection of wooden and terracotta crystallographic models (several hundreds). During the 2000s, enhancement and rehabilitation action was undertaken. Several series of Krantz models were identified by the logos and linked to catalogs. The relation of these models to the important work of Paul Heinrich von Groth, in cooperation with the Krantz company, is highlighted. An exceptional element was discovered: a polyhedron with 170 facets, from the cubic system. After a short description of the model, we report on the digitalization work, followed by a description of two duplication methods: 3D printing and precision lost-wax vacuum casting.