Living on a brownfield site
Zurich-West 2018 © Frédéric Frank
Frédéric Frank, associate professor at the Haute école d’ingénierie et d’architecture de Fribourg (HEIA-FR), was the guest of Prof. Emmanuel Rey’s studio at the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) to talk about different forms of housing in the context of urban regeneration. Entitled “Living on a brownfield site”, his conference allowed the students to understand the main challenges of these changing territories and to discover several contemporary projects confronted with the specific dimensions of this post-industrial imaginary.
After studying architecture, Frédéric Frank obtained a PhD from the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in 2009. He then continued his research and teaching activity at EPFL, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon (ENSAL), and at New York University (NYU). Since 2017 he has been a professor of architectural and city theory Haute Ecole d’ingénierie et d’architecture de Fribourg (HEIA-FR).
Highlighting certain specificities inherent in the development of housing on former industrial sites, the conference brought out various specific questions that any brownfield transformation project now faces: relationship to the landscape, heritage conservation, diversity of housing needs, functional diversity, and sustainability issues.
Resonating with the issues addressed in the RHODANIE URBAINE studio, these multiple considerations has enriched the theoretical corpus of the students with a view to changing these urban territories in transition.