Tristan Denis mène un doctorat en architecture dirigé par Susanne Stacher au sein du LéaV et de l’école doctorale AHSS de CY Cergy Paris Université. Ce travail de recherche qu’accueille TVK dans le cadre d’une CIFRE (convention industrielle de formation par la recherche) est l’occasion de construire et de développer l’axe de recherche « Matières » porté par l’agence.

De même que la question urbaine, puis le phénomène métropolitain ont au siècle précédent mis en crise l’art d’habiter le monde, la question terrestre, portée aujourd’hui par le dialogue entre les sciences naturelles et sociales, oblige une nouvelle fois à recharger les concepts et pratiques pour permettre aux architectes de penser la façon de s’installer sur une Terre durablement agitée.

Over the last twenty years, the topsoil has reappeared on the former industrial sites on the right bank of the River Garonne in the city of Bordeaux. After a period of neglect, several major projects have helped to build the structural framework of a landscape in the residential development of this vast polder which was built from the 18th century onwards.

Comment concilier habitats humains et habitats non-humains ? C’est la question qui résume le défi posé par le « Village des médias » sur lequel TVK a travaillé depuis 2015. Ce projet urbain, situé sur les communes du Bourget, de Dugny et de la Courneuve, est destiné à accueillir les journalistes du monde entier durant les Jeux à l’été 2024.

À l'opposé des représentations de projets urbains souvent concentrées sur l’avant/après, nos contributeurs imaginent des scénarios dynamiques de transformation de la ville. Pour le guide Places du Grand Paris ils dessinent le récit d’un quartier de gare fictif qui prend en compte toutes les temporalités et les aléas qui nourrissent le projet. Alors il n’est plus une destination mais un voyage…

L’architecture n’est pas ce qui est posé sur la surface de la Terre par les humains mais la « forme qui sans cesse émerge du corps à corps des êtres vivants avec les matières terrestres ». TVK mène depuis plusieurs années une recherche sur la morphologie terrestre en reprenant les travaux de morphologie urbaine à l’aune du changement de regard anthropologique sur la nature que nous impose les crises du climat et du vivant.

The monumental statue of the Republic of Charles and Léopold Morice was inaugurated in 1883 in Paris on the eponymous square, almost a hundred years after the French Revolution. Within a century, Parisian squares and green areas have been filled with statues, as if the Notre-Dame’s stone book had spread into the public space of the capital city.

Il y a un paradoxe frappant dans le fait que ce que l’on nomme architecture désigne communément le monde des édifices en excluant celui du sol, alors que le domaine dans lequel l’homme a produit le plus d’architecture – on pourrait dire que l’homme a le plus « architecturé » – au cours de son histoire, est précisément celui du sol lui-même.

It is vital to look back on Gordon Matta-Clark’s work, among other reasons, to highlight little-known facets of a shape-shifting oeuvre. The exhibition “Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect”, and the accompanying catalogue, do so by revealing Matta-Clark as truly engaged in his era, concerned with the nameless, the have-nots of his time

There is a striking paradox in the fact that, from that which is called architecture, commonly designing the world of buildings, the ground is excluded, in that the very area in which man has produced the most architecture – one could say that man has most “architectured” – in the course of his history, is precisely the ground itself.

With the Mediterranean Sea as their starting point, research collective Avalanche (TVK, Anyoji Beltrando and KH studio) reflects on the Sea and Earth as infrastructure. The Mediterranean as the birthplace of the Babylonian myth has been swallowed in a liquid infrastructure of global trading that turns the back to its hinterland and resettle in the open sea.

The objective of TVK’s research is to grapple with the complexity and paradoxical character of the contemporary city, to pursue its construction in a time that would be on the one hand continuous—a set of rules that would transcend the contextual and contingent real (an utopia?)—and on the other hand, discontinuous, which, conceived in “seasons”, allows the project to always happen without linearity or certainty (an uchronia?). As such there is forged their concept of “screenwriting” (scénarisation), of urban design in particular and architecture in general.

The Mediterranean Sea, a space where some of the most powerful forms of urban living were born is today a vertiginous place. The Sea is at the same time bathing spot and place of death, a burning border between north and south.

Paris’s inner suburbs form an urban ring that has its own existence and definition: a clearly legible space, a periphery, la ville du Périphérique [The Ring Road City]: a vast metropolitan open space

Faced with this fact, one strategy is possible: a “weak points” method, which would ‘tackle’ the little things, the weak points of the road system, and echo the increased importance of “weak signals”, in terms of mobility practices.

The public places around the metro stations of Greater Paris refer to the vague notion of metropolitan public place. To remedy this vagueness, I suggest that we look at the more precise issue of the metropolitan place. The public places around stations in fact represent the contact point between the metropolitan dimension (the network of mobility) and the place (the local territory).

It is possible to see the construction of Thiers’s city wall in 1845 as the starting point of the modern adventure for Paris and the beginning of the building of the Parisian metropolis. Originally, the military rampart was a wall in the midst of fields, but one which founded a new city and an administrative boundary which today still defines an inside and an outside, a centre and a periphery…

The Greater Paris is a fiction. The reality is that of a famous, dense and extremely concentric European capital with its long and prestigious contribution to the history of urban planning, at the centre of a vast metropolitan area defying description

Street furniture’ is the term we use for objects that ‘inhabit’ the public environment, despite them not being mobile. What this term in fact designates is the non-immutable nature of objects that are liable to change more often than the city’s buildings.

The metropolitan condition created by modernity has engendered such paradoxes that the future of metropolises will depend greatly on everybody’s capacity to surpass and harmonise them...

This embedded monument is a receptacle for the expression of the strengths of a district.

The sustainable city imperative must not lead to an obsession with the future, but being capable of thinking on a long-term basis, and therefore of also thinking in terms of the past. The sustainable transformation of metropolises must be a metamorphosis.

Deciphering the city as it exists presupposes understanding the most obscure and hard-to-describe urban phenomena. The fact is that the historical parts of the city are often well assimilated and well-known, while elements which are the hardest to understand are to be found among the most recent, among the emerging phenomena which form the city’s indescribable present…

Preparing the beltway zone’s regeneration through projects for its transformation and metamorphosis is a huge challenge. Eliminating Paris’s beltway would be senseless because it represents an extremely important historic sedimentary layer.

The highroad is paradoxical. While it irrigates and opens up the world, it also divides and pollutes it. Roads and cars formerly brought adventure, freedom and development; now they are hated. However, the highroad is there, firmly present, still young and robust…

In the contemporary city-dweller’s imagination and sensibility, the large-scale infrastructures so familiar to most of us are incompatible with the city.