IDEAS, a new doctoral thematic in the EDAR program

The ENAC Research Day 2012 entitled "Energy in the City" was the occasion to present the new doctoral thematic related to specific issues of "Integrated Design, Architecture and Sustainability" (IDEAS). This program, initiated jointly by the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Performance-Integrated Design (LIPID) and the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) as part of the doctoral program "Architecture and Sciences of the City" (EDAR), will start as from next fall.

Nowadays the number of human beings living in urban areas reaches a level never equaled in the whole of the history of humanity before. If political and economic challenges have always been concentrated in cities, today they face particularly complex problems such as sociocultural equilibrium, quality of life and resource management. These topics come into strong resonance with the research lines of the LAST, who aims specifically at promoting the emergence of new knowledge in the field of sustainable architecture, at revealing transposable innovation potentials in the architectural production and at identifying optimization processes at the scale of the neighborhood, of the building and of its components.

To meet these multiple challenges requires the development of new approaches that are simultaneously creative, holistic, interdisciplinary and evaluative. This is the spirit in which the new doctoral thematic "Integrated Design, Architecture and Sustainability" (IDEAS) was initiated. It lies on one hand on an interdisciplinary teaching, in the form of seminars and workshops, and on the other hand on a structured networking of the PhD students concerned. Open to EDAR members, it can also be followed by those coming from other doctoral schools. With its emphasis on interdisciplinarity, this course of studies focuses as much on architects as on urban planners, civil and mechanical engineers, environmental scientists or physicists.