Option: Experimentation (44 h)

First contact with the notion of theatrical scenography through a key operatic work.

Continuous assessment, experiments, group reports.

References:
Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 short story: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Carmen_(M%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e)/Texte_entier
The libretto of Georges Bizet’s 4-act opera based on a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, after Prosper Mérimée’s short story, first performed in 1875: https://www.musicologie.org/sites/c/carmen.html
A documentary on Carmen, online until 01/02/2026 on Arte Replay: https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/122192-000-A/carmen-naissance-d-un-mythe/

Two recent performances:
Carmen, directed by Jean-François Sivadier, first performed in Lille in May 2010, revived in Strasbourg in December 2021 and in Lausanne in 2025 Captation Lille: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egYvEUUiaCs
Carmen, directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, first performed in Aix-en-Provence in July 2017

Captation Aix-en-Provence (extracts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb0RGbvHEw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9djN6p4w3VI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmSERf7Ycb8

And Carmen, revival, February 7 to March 19 2026 at Opéra Bastille (Calixto Bieito / Alfons Flores) Trailer: https://www.operadeparis.fr/saison-25-26/opera/carmen

Other operatic, literary, theatrical, cinematographic, artistic and popular culture references will be given during the workshop.

Objectives: The aim of this course is to acquire a practical knowledge of photography. Technical training should enable students to produce their own images and develop their own vision through the elaboration of a photographic project rendered in the form of a book.

During the whole week, the teaching is centered on the discovery of film photography, followed by practical exercises to understand how the digital camera works and the fundamentals of the medium (light, framing).

The work is carried out in the workshop or outdoors in the form of directed or independent assignments, which are then assessed.

During the following three 3-hour sessions, students produce an editorial work (selection), then learn the basics of digital image processing and page layout (using Adobe photohop and Indesign).

B.U.L et R. Ultra-light bottles and recycling

LANGUAGE OF TEACHING AND COMMUNICATION: FRENCH => Students must be sufficiently fluent in French to enable us to communicate with them, especially on technical issues.

Objectives : 

– Build mobile urban interference structures (of a social and/or artistic nature)

– having fun … developing sophisticated morphologies, implementations and/or static or dynamic schemes.

– To develop a truly ecological approach by putting into practice, within the framework of the design of a structure:
– The concern for an optimized relationship between structure and form => economy of materials
– The use of renewable natural materials (Bamboos…). Non-natural materials will be used sparingly.
– The use of ultra-local resources (bamboos from the Parc de La Villette for the first prototypes in any case…)
– The use of materials found in garbage cans or on sidewalks.

– Confronting the manufacturing process

Presence, participation, realization

Collection, design and production of prototype(s).

TEACHING OBJECTIVES
Based on a problem chosen by the teacher (sailboat, object), the aim, through the world of the object in relation to architecture and landscape, is to be able to criticize one’s approach (crossing fields, mobility, scale relationships) upstream of shaping, and then to be able to use tools adapted to the project and the mastery of curved, complex shapes (developable or non-developable) such as the shape plans used in naval architecture. The components of this construction are based on an architectural, technological and physical approach.

EVALUATION METHOD
Continuous assessment 50%.
Final examination in the form of a project report.

LANGUAGE OF TEACHING: French
LANGUAGES OF COMMUNICATION: French, English and Spanish
Become aware of the importance of living things in urban spaces. Understand the impact of anthropized spaces, and the choices to be made to preserve and develop biodiversity in the city.

Continuous assessment: active class attendance, personal and team work, final oral presentation of project.

Graphic research, drawings and slide presentation of the chosen site.
Project, sketches, mold development for initial plaster molding experimentation.
Final project, Rhino modeling, Creation of a file to start digital cutting of the mold elements.
Casting and demolding of the designed object.
Course language: French
Languages of communication: French, English and Spanish
Erasmus students are welcome, and assignments can be submitted in French, English or Spanish. However, a good understanding of French is essential.

A general bibliography will be provided at the start of the three-day introductory course before the intensive week.

Dessiner en ville aims both to give space to drawing and its practice, and to reaffirm the tool of representation.
We’re in town, we’re drawing.

The assessment is based on
– a corpus of digitized drawings published online
– a published article articulating these drawings as a response to the subject
– an oral presentation of this article.

Sessions are devoted to the production and publication of digital documents (scanning, processing, naming, database and online publishing).

This course has three objectives:
– Introduce students to the links between architecture and ergonomics in terms of the many organizational, social and spatial issues involved in workplace design.
– Understand the contribution of an ergonomic analysis of work activities to architectural programming and design.
– Understand the role and skills of the architect in interventions aimed at transforming work situations.

Continuous assessment through participation in sessions. Portfolio of work produced in the various exercises, accompanied by a reflective note on the role and skills of the architect in the field of workplace design and its interaction with other disciplines.

Photography, photomontages, writing and publishing

Chimène Denneulin, photographer, visual artist and graphic designer
Lucas Mongin, architect
François Ballaud, writer
Partnership under construction with Agglomération Béthune-Bruay – Bassin minier des Hauts de France

Run in pairs by a photographer and an architect, the course examines the imaginary world of industrial heritage in the light of global warming, and introduces notions of counter-visuality through the creation of documentary or fictional compositions combining text and images.

Counter-models for the Anthropocene

Industrial heritage, an architectural ensemble emblematic of the Anthropocene, fascinates as much as it crystallizes the social and ecological issues of the world to come. The object of urban exploration (Urbex) and photographic reports of a tourism of abandonment, industrial heritage allows for so many borderline experiences that question the register of representation. Once the thrill of the transgressive, scopophilic visit has passed, and well beyond the field of architecture alone, the aim is to question the anthropic dimensions attached to the transformation of industrial buildings. Photomontage is more than just a tool for representation; it’s a way of deconstructing questioning models. By learning about the archetypal forces that have underpinned visual production since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and then enriching our understanding of ecosophical theories and thoughts on disorder, the practice of photomontage may enable us to think about architectural, urban and landscape projects for humans and the living.
At the same time, we’ll be studying and presenting the writings of architects, artists, researchers and theorists who are interested in the built or deconstructed object, and whose writing practice pursues an objective that goes beyond that of simple narrative: architecture as a mental object, the role of non-constructed architectures as active elements of architecture, the diversity of architectural objects that populate the construction/inconstruction grey zone (models, plans, notes/diaries, writings of all kinds, residual objects, etc.), the influence on perceived and experienced space of our “knowledge of the unconstructed” (the knowledge that here this could have been done differently, for example), or the subterranean work of architecture.), the influence on perceived and lived space of our “knowledge of inconstruction” (the knowledge that here this could have been done differently, for example), or the subterranean work of inconstruction from the point of view of a critique of architectural productivism (the architectural gesture in the age of climatic and economic catastrophe as defect, lack, rejection of construction, subtraction).

The aim of this workshop is to get to the heart of the architecture-writing relationship, by criticizing the simplistic constructive dogma at face value: architects who write do not build, and are therefore not architects.

Continuous control

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Max Bonhomme, Max, Propaganda or pedagogy? Charlotte Perriand et la culture visuelle de la gauche internationale in Damarice Amao and Emmanuelle Kouchner (dir.), Charlotte Perriand, politique du photomontage. Comment voulons-nous vivre, Arles, Actes Sud, 2021.
Clément Dessy, Valérie Sténion, (Bé)vues du futur : Les imaginaires visuels de la dystopie, 1840-1940, 2015
Aude Le Gallou, “Géographie des lieux abandonnés. De l’urbex au tourisme de l’abandon : perspectives croisées à partir de Berlin et Détroit”, Trajectoires [En ligne], 15 | 2022
Alfred Gell, L’art et ses agents, une théorie anthropologique, Les presses du réel, 2009 (1998)
André Gunthert, L’Image partagée. La photographie numérique, Paris, Textuel, 2015
Danièle Méaux and Jonathan Tichit (dir.), Arts contemporains et Anthropocène, Paris, Hermann, 2022
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Duke University Press, 2011
Bruce Bégout, Obsolescence des ruines
Marc Augé, Le temps des ruines
Ivan Strauss, Sarajevo, l’architecte et les barbares
Jean-Christophe Bailly, Dépaysement
Louis Marin, Utopiques. Playing with space
Keller Easterling, Subtraction
Stephen Cairns and Jane Margaret. Buildings must die. A perverse view of architecture
Peter Swinnen, I prefer not to…
Anna Tsing et alii, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction

Title : L’ar(t)chitecture en représentations: relever et révéler la singularité du paysage – Une approche sensible et contextuelle des milieux.

Tim Ingold’s “Faire Anthropologie, Archéologie, Art et Architecture “* addresses the question of how to think by acting, rather than how to act by thinking.

This opposition between theorists and practitioners goes to the very heart of the issue of making in architecture schools. The question of representation, of drawing, is obviously central, but the emergence of a sensitive, critical and creative spirit, as well as experimentation, are just as essential. Sensitive in the way we perceive, but creative in the way we reason, synthesize, retranscribe and problematize a subject.

But how can we create situations in which students discover things for themselves? How can we understand that architecture, the world and our relationship with the world are built in a relationship with natural systems, environments and our society?

The course introduces the issue of sensitivity in architecture through a methodological approach to observation, analysis and reflection on environments and landscapes. It is based on transdisciplinary didactics and experimentation, involving the fields of RA, APV, VT, Landscape and TPCAU. It enables us to move progressively from surveying to a project of representation – a project understood here as a process – and to innovate in the types of representation through abstraction, drawing, photography, video, sensitive mapping and reference to other disciplinary fields.

The aim is to make students aware of the existence of a corpus of texts, notions and figurations that describe landscape – understood in the broadest sense: more or less natural space, park or garden, suburban territory or urban landscape – as a place of convergence between the physical reality of a territory and its representations, and to show how this learned culture of landscape, admittedly recent and fragile, shapes our relationship to our natural environment.

This approach brings together an educational theme and an object/territory. The interest lies in the possibility of approaching a landscape from a distinct theoretical angle, or from another disciplinary field (‘view from above’, ‘landscape in movement’, ‘cinematographic landscape’, etc.), so that the drawings, photographs and experiments carried out during the appropriation period are not confined to a simple instructive approach, but intellectually mobilize the student with the aim of constructing his or her own methodology and corpus of representation.

Individual and group work spread over the semester.

Nils BUTTNER, ‘L’art du paysage’, Editions Citadelles et Mazenod, March 2007
Alain MEROT, ‘Du paysage en peinture dans l’Occident moderne’, Gallimard, 2009
Collective work edited by Angela Lampe, ‘Vues d’en haut’, Exhibition catalog, Edition Centre
Georges Pompidou, 2013
Anne CAUQUELIN, ‘L’invention du paysage’, Paris, Plon, 1989
Alain ROGER, ‘Court traité du paysage’, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1997
Collective work, ‘Dessiner en plein air’, exhibition catalog, co-published by Musée du Louvre éditions /Liénart
Editions, 2017
Christophe OLLIER, ‘Paysage Cosa mentale, le renouvellement de la notion de paysage à travers la
contemporary photography’, Editions LOCO, 2013
Raphaële BERTHO and Héloïse CONESA, ‘Paysages français, une aventure photographique, 1984 – 2017’,
Éditions de la BnF, 2017
Michel CONAN, ‘Dictionnaire historique de l’Art des Jardins’ (Historical dictionary of garden design)
Marc DESPORTES, ‘Paysage en mouvement’, Paris Editions Gallimard
Danièle MÉAUX and Jean-Pierre MOUREY, ‘Le Paysage au rythme du voyage’, Publications de l’Université de
Saint-Étienne
Michel POIVERT, ‘La photographie contemporaine’, Paris, Flammarion, 2002
Frédéric POUSIN, ‘Paysage et environnement : quelles mutations pour les projets d’aménagement ?’ (With D.
Delbaere) Espaces et sociétés n°2 -2011
Alain ROGER, ‘La théorie du paysage en France’, Paris, Champ Vallon, 1995
Philippe THÉBAUD, ‘Dictionnaire des jardins et paysages’ (Dictionary of gardens and landscapes)

Eva PROUTEAU, ‘Estuaire, le paysage, l’art et le fleuve’, Revue, revue 303, collection arts, recherches, créations, N°122, R 27995-0122-F, ISSN)
Paul ARDENNE, “Un art contextuel, création artistique en milieu urbain, en situation, d’intervention, de participation”, Champs Arts collection, Flammarion publisher, ISBN2081225131, 2009
Rosalind KRAUSS, “Passages. Une histoire de la sculpture de Rodin à Smithson”, translator Claire Brunet, Collection Vues, ISBN 978-2-86589-056-9, 1st ed.
edition: 1997, 4th edition: 2015
James WINES, SITE: Identity in Density (Master Architect), Master Architect series, Edition Images Publishing, ISBN-10: 1920744215, 2006
Nicolas BOURRIAUD, “L’esthétique relationnelle”, Documents sur l’art collection, Les Presses du réel, ISBN 284066030X, 1998
Ministère de la CULTURE, Rapport la MNACEP, mesures concrètes pour l’art dans l’espace public, report by the national mission for art and culture in the public space chaired by Jean Blaise, 2014
Elea BAUCHERON, Celine DELAVAUX, XXL ART, when Artists think big, Edition Prestel, ISBN-10: 3791349821, 2014
Eden MORFAUX, “Open Sky Museum , Un musée à ciel ouvert,” artist invited by the research group at the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Edition les
Presses du Réel, ISBN: 978-2-916067-93-3, 2015
Philippe RAHM, ‘Histoire naturelle de l’architecture, Comment le climat, les épidémies et l’énergie ont façonné la ville et les bâtiments’, Points edition, p 368, 2023

LANGUAGE OF TEACHING: French
LANGUAGES OF COMMUNICATION: French, English and Spanish
Trees are an important component of cities: in gardens, in the heart of blocks, in squares, along planted roads or river banks, they structure space and transform the landscape with the passing seasons. Everyday companions, they remain little-known, and the age-old relationship between societies and trees has been forgotten.
While the problems they encounter or cause in cities are directly linked to this amnesia, trees represent one of the answers to the environmental and climatic problems (among others) of large conurbations.
In order to rediscover the relationship between trees and people, and with the aim of taking better account of their needs and characteristics, this course will give students the tools they need to make reasoned choices and implement them sensitively in their planting or site requalification projects.

Continuous assessment: active attendance at classes, seminars and visits; personal and team work, final oral presentation of an exercise

Exercises (TD) are an opportunity to work together, giving pride of place to dialogue and drawing.
Four types of work will be proposed, most of which will be carried out during the course, on the occasion of visits or in the classroom:
-A collective leaf herbarium
-A graphical study of shadows cast by trees and their characteristics according to species
– A map of inter-tree cooperation (underground networks, for example) inspired by the work of contemporary artists on the subject
-A photographic observation of the transformations of a planted urban site, between September and December
These exercises will help you get to know the trees in the city in a sensitive and plastic way (observation and recognition of trees), as individuals, and as constituent and transformative elements of space (analysis of the relationship with a plant or built environment), in their evolution over the seasons (observation of the transformations of a site).

Course language: French
Languages of communication: French, English and Spanish
Erasmus students are welcome, and assignments can be submitted in French, English or Spanish. However, a good understanding of French is essential.

A general bibliography is given at the beginning of the intensive week, along with information on resource sites and websites. A detailed bibliography accompanies each course.