germe&JAM: City design, text and contexts

Successive critiques of functionalist urbanism and post-modern endeavors frozen in their aporias have struggled, despite the rise of the urban project as a recognized practice, to produce convincing urban fabrics, while the franchised and deterritorialized city tends to condemn territory to the logic of merchandise, the city to vacuity and architecture to decoration.

How can we overcome the standardization of an increasingly generic urban production? Between the urbs and the civitas, the necessary and desired sanctuarization of public space and the landscape at the heart of the city project is not enough without renewed thought of the private space that constitutes the “text” of a city, its complexity and its intensity. Doesn’t the answer lie in the discipline of architecture itself, and in its imaginations that are conducive to exploring “ordinary” urban fabrics, inscribed in a process that is at once sedimented, sustainable and capable of giving tomorrow’s necessary renewal of the city on itself a specific depth and tone?

Through a thematic path interwoven with a number of urban and architectural projects, the exhibition presents the germe&JAM collective ‘s patient research into the development of an “urban grammar” that questions the relevance of certain fundamental paradigms of urban form to the different situations, scales and issues characteristic of the contemporary city and the city of tomorrow.

Led by four associates, including Philippe Chavanes and Paul Bouvier, who teach at ENSA Paris-la Villette, germe&JAM brings together some twenty architects, urban planners and landscape architects.