-President of the laboratory of research / New-territories
-Co-founder and Principal of R&Sie(n) [1]/ Studio of architectural practices / Paris
-Co-founder of [eIf/bʌt/c][2] / Institute for contingent scenario / Bangkok
-Guest Research professor in master class at Columbia-Gsapp / New-York
[1] R&Sie(n) was founded in 1993 by François Roche (Paris) and Stéphanie Lavaux (Réunion), Jean Navarro (France)
[2] [eIf/bʌt/c] was founded in 2012 by François Roche (1961, Paris) and Camille Lacadée (1986, Bordeaux)
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New-Territories is organized on three sets of themes : Research as Speculation, Fiction as Practice, and Practice as Lifespan (H&N)
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– Here and Now: An architecture which expresses the action to produce in real-time, and that this moment indicates the fragile moment which negotiates with the arrow of time, with the transitory one or what seems the being in order to give an account of the strategies of interventions like as much of negotiation with the constraints and the economies.
– Here and tomorrow (fiction / from Latin fictio as “a making to form, mold, shape…”): An architecture which expresses the action to produce in differed and altered time. Simultaneously operative and fictional, it tries to re-scenarize the relation with a situation, an environment, an industrial innovation like a capable fiction to become a vector of reality, a principle of capable expertise of transforming this same reality.
– Elsewhere and simultaneously (speculation): An architecture which expresses the action to produce in a speculative time, and which works out devices between robotics, mathematics, neurobiology and biochemistry, in order to take the risk of a critical, political and esthetic emission. The investigation of the new technological tools opens lines of thoughts which nourish and nourish the imaginary ones. R&Sie (n) tries through manifest exposures to give an account of the field of these possible, but also of their projection and uncertainties, mishearings and misunderstandings… and through academic Lab(s) research and teaching called (n)certainties at Gsapp/RMIT/Angewandte/USC…
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New-Territories unfold their protocols through the re-staging of different kinds of contemporary relationships: aesthetical, machinist, computational and even artificial. They employ speculations and fictions as operative strategies to unalienate operative modes and infiltrate “media culture” in order to subvert its conventions. They consider architectural identity as emanating from uncertainty principles defined through provisional processes and forms in which animism, vitalism and mechanism become vectors of dynamic mutations.
They critically engage contemporary technology in experiments alchemically mixing Eros and Thanatos to develop deliberately ambiguous scenarios that fuse realities that would seem immiscible. Their synthetic devices works out possible somewhere between attractions and aversions, simultaneously mixes of obstacles and possibilities, waste material and efflorescence, threats and protections, mechanical powers and natural forces. Here everything is intertwined and knotted, in the process of becoming, in a movement in becoming. “Let yourself slip through their work and feel its silky and strange texture as terrifies and caresses you.”
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