Study trip to Marseille
Vieux-Port, Marseille © EPFL / LAST
The studio of Prof. Emmanuel Rey of the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) went this year on a study trip to Marseille. This extramural teaching activity was an opportunity for the students to visit various urban fabrics in the process of regeneration, public space projects and works of architecture that resonate with the issues addressed in the RHODANIE URBAINE design studio.
Architectural design is expected to play an important part in the search for alternatives to reorient urban development through densification strategies. By an approach at different scales, LAST's studio aims precisely at analyzing, exploring, and experimenting specific issues to this contribution of architecture to the sustainability of urban areas.
The study trip to the city of Marseille was conceived in this spirit, with the objective to allow the students to enhance their range of reference. This was an opportunity to visit many emblematic projects, such as Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse, Fernand Pouillon's reconstruction of the Old Port, or more recent projects, such as Rudy Ricciotti's Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) or Norman Foster's Ombrière.
A presentation of the Friche Belle de Mai commented by Nicolas Mémain, an urban walk with Carina Kurta, a visit of housing operations with the architect Stéphane Fernandez and a conference by Franck Geiling on the challenges of urban development within the Aix-Marseille-Provence Metropolis were also on the program.
These multiple approaches helped to put into perspective issues of conceptual coherence, built morphology, spatiality, typology, and expression with broader themes related to the urban mutation processes, which the majority of European metropolis must face today.