Passages to utopia

Utopiades 2015
Friday Mars 27, 2015: symposium and debates organized by the School of Architecture of Nantes

Urban planning and metropolitan projects on the transit line tangent with Nantes agglomeration.

Between a symposium, a “schubertiade” and an improvisation match, the fifth “Utopiades” is an opportunity, during one day, to expose, confront and hybridize a corpus of utopian proposals from various disciplines.

The presentations will be brief and deal with contrasting disciplines and problematics: philosophy, architecture, agriculture, mobility, contemporary art. They will enable confrontations of two different attitudes: analytical and projectual. Hybridizations reintroduce the question of the relationship between different scales (spaces, uses or time), during discussions and workshops devoted to cross arguments in order to invent original programs.

This symposium is part of an Master 1 & 2  student programme entitled “Metropolitan Utopias” proposed by Pascal Amphoux. Considering this year a public transport line tangent with Nantes agglomeration, its pragmatically aims at producing a set of realistic utopias – in short, medium and long term – along this line and developing prospective visions around its stops and their environments.

The pedagogical challenge of this course is to simultaneously raise programs and projects  at three different levels:
-? the metropolitan scale (Grand Nantes)
-? the scale of a changing rural or suburban area, planned or under construction (seven benchmarks stations between the  Cardo interchange and the Bac in Indret-sur-Loire)
-? the architecture scale (a building and a public space linked with the territory).

New mobilities, differential densifications and active naturations are topics of reference, among which the participants have to invent a project and program. How? These Utopidades are meant to be in a position of programmatic invention.

Organized by the National School of Nantes architecture, this day is open, in addition to a group of twenty students, to all actors of the territory involved in this prorgamme, the school’s teachers and researchers or to any interested person .

It will benefit from the presence of external sponsors and other partners of the workshop. The invited guests are Jean-Pierre Orfeuil, Pierre Lafont,  Petra Marguc, Bruno Queysanne,Thierry Laverne and Jean-Paul Huard.