Winter School

Les formes du réemploi/Forms of Reuse, Thibaut Barrault

In 2024, the school's Winter School posed questions related to reuse, the reutilization of materials, or recycling. The first means preserves function, the second form, the third matter, but all structure indulgent looks with the material heritage that surrounds us. These processes are all methods and techniques for reclaiming waste, commitments to combat obsolescence, tools for giving a second life to the objects and materials in our environment, and possible readings of the territories in which we work. If these commitments seem current and necessary, they are struggling to find a stronger relationship with the architectural discipline. They tend to take precedence over any other aspect of design, and to be defined as sufficient to make a project. Thus, the Winter School Les formes du réemploi is an invitation to think collectively about the ideas and forms of reusing the materials and objects of our everyday lives, and seeks to confront them with formal and cultural ambitions more firmly rooted in the history, present and future of architecture. Associated with the notions of "as-found" and "ready-made", these processes recall the great artistic canons and allow us to take a committed aesthetic stance. Confronted with questions of construction and assembly, they point to the subject of language and suggest a new definition.
Combined with the need for economy of means, they take a poetic view of the already existing, and augment constructive rationalism with contemporary concerns. Extended to larger scales, they enable us to identify and understand the relationships between territories, and to grasp the issues of displacement and metabolisms.