In today’s emerging urban situation both the semantic and the cultural are perverted and dwarfed by the need for a global iconography. As cities struggle to achieve iconic status, local conditions have bent to the will of the global. Situating their prospective research in a moment of transience ' between what was and what is to be ' Intermediate 4 students looked to Paris, a city that defies change, in order to develop possible futures and alternative pasts for the twenty-first-century city.
‘Skyline’ was understood as a conceptual tool and revealing agent devised to read over-managed and augmented Singapore and tackle bi-polar Paris. Situating ourselves on their shared axis, the projects of Intermediate 4 exposed dualities between the ethereal image and the harsher self, studying the antagonistic relationship between the historical city and the segregated corporate district of La Défense. With the collective will of a nineteenth-century autocrat, our proposals invested an architectural no man’s land where the Haussmannian mask disintegrates. We infiltrated world monuments from within and inhabited floating spaces around and above the city. Students suggested time-based strategies that played on a local psyche formed by paradoxical affinities for grandness, novelty and historical continuation. Alternative or derivative histories for a Paris redesigned through hypothetical changes produced a chain of events as an architectural project. Environmental and regulatory studies through parametric optimisation led to unexpected parallel cities, such as an inhabited urban cloud on stilts that mirrored its analogue essence
Virtual verticality or erasure as a design technique revealed the collusion between form and social media-driven expectations. The interstitial gap between cultural and religious substance and the disincarnating action of monumentality engendered novel mapping and stealth projects in fleeting monuments.
A future Paris was made of many potential selves.
Denis Lacej
Lara Belkind
Hao Wen Lim
Eugene Tan
Carolina Gismondi
Regina Kertapati
Hussam Dakak
Harikleia Karamali
Eulalia Moran
Peter Karl-Becher
Yechiam Karu
Alex Warnock Smith
Daniel Leon
Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange
Brett Steele
Nathalie Rozencwajg studied and has been teaching at the AA since 2004 as well as being the coordinator of the AA Visiting School in Singapore. She is cofounder of RARE architects, based in Paris and London. The office emphasises projects at different scales, integrating research, design and experimentation. Lecturing worldwide, She was commended by the AJ as a leading emerging woman in architecture.
Michel da Costa Gonçalves studied in Spain and France, graduated from the AA Emergent Technologies & Design programme and is a co-founder of award-wining office RARE architects. As director and author of the 'City' series for Autrement publishers and contributor to The Art of Artificial Evolution / Springer Natural Computing Series, he has previously taught at the ENSAPL. He has also coordinated the AA Visiting School Singapore workshop since 2006.
