The world is on fire, materially, politically, socially, and there's no sign of any appeasement ahead which could prevent these different hotbeds from converging in the coming years.
In this situation, the narrative promoted by architecture schools is to keep on producing buildings by "building better", with "zero carbon emission", "green" constructions. Architecture schools have yet to understand that the problem is of a different nature, at a much wider scale. It is the whole system of human settlements that needs to be reconsidered. 

To address this situation, we have created the Architecture in a World on Fire program at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint-Étienne. It's goal is to take architecture out of its small problems in order to put it at the service of big problems.
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We seek students to help us demonstrate that architecture is a form of knowledge capable of playing a decisive role in a world on fire.

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For thousands of years, architecture has been used by architects to address the crisis of their times. Vitruvius used architecture to help understand the mechanism of the universe. He also provided the military with an architectural knowledge of war machines.
Through buildings, economic theory, the reform of grammar, mathematics and other projects, Alberti used architecture to help create a healthy and stable world in a time when the black plague wiped out half the population of Europe. Palladio reformed the art of war in a world in which warfare was intensifying through the perfection of artillery. Vauban designed a general income tax for the entire French Kingdom to oppose the neverending famines and vast destructions caused by Louis the XIV’s perpetual wars. 

Closer to us, the “modern movement” was heavily invested in the mechanization of means of production. Architects played a decisive role in transforming the world of handmade objects towards industrial production. Even the immense work that Le Corbusier produced beyond the production of buildings is mostly ghosted. The project of the "Modulor" for instance, is still vastly misunderstood. This measuring system wasn't meant to produce buildings, but rather to merge the two global measuring systems into one. As he noticed, it created massive problems during WWII as the difference in measuring standards made the French and British ammunitions incompatible. 

In our current situation, the confiscation of architectural knowledge by the production of buildings has turned this discipline into the most powerful gear of capital's total destructive enterprise.
Paradoxically, the examples of architecture applied beyond the production of buildings in order to face the uncertainty of one’s epoch are countless... Yet not a single history of architecture has ever told the story of architecture beyond buildings. Such a history would show how architecture’s main objective has always been to protect mankind from the contingency of existence. 

During antiquity up until the Renaissance, this uncertainty of times had a name. It was called “Fortuna”. Climate change has brought back Fortuna to the forefront as we now decisively live in uncertain times.

Vitruvius' analemma

"For the length of the shadows at the equinox determines the configuration of the analemmas from which, given the location and shadow of the gnomons, the hour lines are traced. The analemma is a system, sought in the course of the sun and discovered by observing the shadow that lengthens until the winter solstice, thanks to which architectural procedures and compass tracings have made it possible to find the real mechanism of the universe."
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From Vitrvuvius' De Architectura, Book IX, P 585 of Pierre Gros' french translation, Editions des Belles Lettres, 2015

Machine for the transport of column shafts‍

The disappearance of dynamic objects from the field of architecture constitutes a redefinition of the "technique" itself. The fact that machines and other technical objects belonged to architecture meant that architecture was a field of experiments on the technical and the mechanical. This architecture no longer exists. Vitruvius presents us therefore not so much with a technical understanding of architecture but rather with an architectural understanding of the technique.

Vitruvius' version of archimedes screw

In Book I of De architectura, the first text on Western architecture, Vitruvius writes: "Architecture itself comprises three parts: the construction of buildings, gnomonics and mechanics. "
Hence, the first definition of architecture we are given establishes the discipline as something beyond the production of buildings. In accordance with this statement, Vitruvius devotes three of the ten books of De architectura to objects other than the production of buildings: Book VIII is devoted to hydraulics, Book IX to gnomonics and Book X to mechanics. This statement by Vitruvius, never considered seriously by the historiography of architecture, is central to our program

Chorobates
by J.-P. Adam

"I will now explain the supply of water to country houses and to towns. The first stage is to fix levels. This is done by dioptrae, or water levels, or the chorobates.1 But the more accurate method is by the chorobates because the dioptrae and the water levels mislead." 
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Vitruvius describes in book VIII on Hydraulics the use of chorobates, a machine allowing to implement reliably the slope of a drain.
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Our task as architects is to awaken the archaic function of architecture : Organizing reality to preserve the living, including the non-human, from the misfortunes of times.

We are in a daunting and paradoxical situation where “architecture as buildings” is now the major gasoline of the general ongoing ecocide whereas “architecture beyond buildings” would be one of the few organizational tools available to get us out of this mess...
For this reason we need to massively and urgently transform architecture schools in Vitruvian terms, i.e. as tools to transform the general economy of our reality. In the face of the generalized ongoing ecocide, architecture has long demonstrated its capacity as a powerful organizational tool, beyond the production of buildings. Architectural knowledge is is able to present us with alternative orderings of reality : by participating in the reform of the means of production, proposing alternative ways of redistributing wealth, implementing the transition from very high-energy consumption societies to low-energy societies...

In order to put architecture back on its feet, we need to give it a working definition. Our proposal is simple: architecture is the knowledge of systems. There's nothing new in this definition, which Vitruvius had already codified in his “De architectura”. It is this meaning that enabled him to take on objects as diverse as the organization of a building, the systemic description of the universe or the construction of machines. We need to find our path back to such a comprehension of architecture.

This architectural shift is long due. It is time for a collective recognition of the significant gap between the contemporary restrictive understanding of architecture as "production of buildings" and the much wider role architecture has played in human affairs from Vitruvius to the "modern movement". Such an awareness is necessary for architecture schools and architects to stop being part of the problem and regain a grasp on important matters of our collective reality.

Palladio

Andrea Palladio, studies of infantry formations confronting each other(Oxford, Worcester College Library, n.c. 6, verso)
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"The diagrams beneath this paragraph (...) are probably Palladio’s own ‘designs’ for troop formations. The symbols used to identify the two kinds of armies come from texts, such as Machiavelli’s Arte della Guerra (Florence, 1521) or Battista Della Valle’s Vallo (the first Venetian edition was published in 1524), authentic ‘bestsellers’ of Renaissance literature on warfare. I have used the term ‘designing’ the formations of troops because in the young architect’s mind the forms of the battalions could be superimposed like the plans of complex buildings. Soldiers become bricks and, vice-versa"

Guido Beltramini, Andrea Palladio and the Architecture of the Battle, Fondazione Cariverona, 2009

Fortuna

The goddess Fortuna (1541), Hans Sebald Beham
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Fortuna, in Greco-Roman polytheism, was "a divinity who presided over the fortunes of life", represented "in the form of a woman, sometimes seated and sometimes standing, having a rudder, with a wheel at her side to mark her inconstancy."
Emile Littré, article "Fortune", Dictionnary le Littré

Vauban

"It is certain that France is almost universally short of timber, or at least that it has become extremely scarce, and is getting scarcer by the day. I know of regions where there used to be several thousand acres of woodland, and now there are barely ten; everything has been sold, cut and cut down, especially private woodland, which has almost all been reduced to coppice."
Vauban, Treatise on forest cultivation, 1701

To understand Vauban's consequent interest in the forest, we need to bear in mind that wood was the only source of energy in Vauban's time. Even charcoal was still predominantly made from wood, including for use in the iron and steel industry.

AMO

Work on the architectural redefinition of the European Union project as a post-national union.
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AMO's attempt to revitalize the European Union project is an opportunity to use architecture as knowledge. This project deals with the articulation of parts within a whole in at least two ways: (1) On the one hand, AMO's thinking puts forward the hypothesis of a declaration of interdependence, i.e., it proposes to qualify a type of link to be woven between the parts of the European Union. (2) On the other hand, through its project to pool sustainable energy infrastructures across the Union, it is putting forward the hypothesis of a post-national Europe, i.e. one capable of moving, through this very process of energy transition, towards a Europe of the regions. The project therefore involves redefining what constitutes a part within the European Union as a whole.

Viollet le Duc

Rhombohedral system of Mont-Blanc by Viollet-le-Duc, Médiathèque de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont

"In a few words, I had to explain to those who will read me how and why an architect has from time to time left architecture to enter a domain that seems not to be his own. In fact, our globe is nothing but a great edifice whose every part has a reason for being, its surface affects forms commanded by imperious laws and followed according to a logical order."

Viollet le Duc, The Mont-Blanc massif, 1876

Mutations

Diagram showing the intensification of economic exchanges around the world, Mutations exhibition catalog
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"I think the most important change, compared to the other parts of my youth, was simply the introduction by Ronald Reagan and Margareth Thatcher of the market economy, they somehow decided that ideology was not the important part and not the important orchestrator of life and civilisation but that the market needed to be recognized more and needed to be their final arbitrary of decisions, also in political life. And I think the shift from relatively organized governments, whether they were left or right wing, they were really believing in this power of the state to organize, to have a vision and to implement that vision, somehow Reagan and Thatcher together made that form of government almost suspect and started to work on the dismantling of government »
Rem Koolhaas, AUS Lectures, Sharjah, 2015, 11 min
Registration deadline academic year 2025-2026:
February 1, 2025

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