A multidisciplinary approach to the cross-border project

Résumé En

The teaching team of the first year of the master Aedification, grands territoires, villes of the Grenoble School of Architecture has been developing a pedagogy in which the architectural project would also be the demonstrator of a European cross-border territory project. These interventions are carried out in partnership with the schools of architecture of Saint-Etienne and Strasbourg and local actors. Our teaching team is composed of architects, an urban planner, a landscape architect, a professor of architectural history, a visual artist and a mobility engineer.We begin the year with an analysis of the history of the border region. It shows how the people of these spaces have managed to overcome their differences and live together today. We then move on to a functional, environmental and socio-economic analysis of the region. Although quite close to our Grenoble situation (a temperate country in the heart of Europe), these territories are nevertheless sufficiently different to take the necessary distance and approach contemporary issues of architecture and urbanism with sensitivity. Each of the teachers, with his or her personal experience and skills, helps students to identify these differences, and then to draw inspiration from them in order to reinterpret their daily practice of architecture.Based on this geographical shift, our teaching team trains students to be rigorous and precise in their methods and in their projects. We are particularly attentive to issues related to heritage, urban comfort, biodiversity, mobility, natural hazards, or the reception of populations in difficulty. Group work trains them in collective intelligence; the temporal and geographical leaps of scale, from the elaboration of a territorial strategy to an urban project, then to a building, help them to better understand the interdependence of situations, and consequently, to question their responsibilities, at different geographical scales, in the act of designing and building.