Wednesday October 5 – 2 p.m.-4 p.m. – MSH Bordeaux Salle Jean Borde

In digitalized post-pandemic human activity, the weakening of experience, failing its complete cancellation, seems to be an inevitable horizon. For pragmatist approaches to architecture, this perspective is inadmissible, things exist by the fact that we experience them. In any situation, knowing and doing are the same thing, the practitioner, the poet, the artist and even the scientist, technician and architect tell us.

In the field of housing, this impoverishment of ordinary experience results in part from inappropriate current architectural design procedures. How to become capable of grasping, representing or simply describing living environments as complex phenomena, that is to say as non-systems in the words of Edouard Glissant.

Daniel Estevez will present different architectural experiments carried out in critical environments and in heterogeneous contexts (slum in South Africa, transit city in France, abandoned structures in Argentina, transformed buildings in Viet Nam, etc.).

These case studies, exhibited at the XVII ^{International} Architecture Biennale in Venice, grant a central role to experience in the transformation of inhabited situations. The principle of transformation then seems to define a new paradigm for the design of architecture and the city based on a certain use of critical thinking: stop building, stop demolishing, transform situations.

Daniel Estevez is an architect and engineer in Artificial Intelligence. Professor of ENSA, HDR (Paris 8), he is also a researcher at the LRA of ENSA Toulouse and head of the Art, Architecture, Design group. Since 1995, his scientific work concerns the study of design practices in architecture, their transformations and their teachability. His recent work connects certain tools of contemporary architectural design (survey, diagram, protocols, etc.) and popular or anonymous practices for producing ordinary space. Numerous experiments carried out in this field are brought together in his work: Non-Formal Design in Architecture (L'Harmattan 2014). In 2020 Daniel Estevez won the French Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale with the project “Communities at Work” in collaboration with Christophe Hutin Architecture with whom he has worked since 2010 (Learning From Workshops).

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