IN-PERSON New Schools of Thought

Abstract

The speculative architecture laboratory of the Laval University School of Architecture, under the direction of Professor Jean Verville, explores the narrative evocative power of architecture to activate a collective speculative vision. The socially engaged approach of students to the master’s deg in architecture, summons new ways to convey ideas that promote transdisciplinary reflection in order to imagine innovative and hopeful ethical devices. This participative pedagogy approach calling for play and humor while legitimizing abstract thinking aims to develop alternative scenarios, influenced by current and future issues, as well as to push the current limits while assessing their impacts on space, cultures and communities. The experimentation of participatory, performative and committed proposals is a fundamental principle. Oscillating between claim and argumentation, formulating new ways of life, expressing resistance or fantasy, architectural speculations offer varied individual interpretations, of a projective problem through experiments favoring hybridization between architecture and other artistic disciplines. The space of freedom, the attraction of novelty and the acceptance of difference serve as a guide for creations outside the codified frame of reference of architectural practice. The mix of universes addressed makes it possible to formulate new proposals by directing the heuristic process of collective creation towards an informed fictional production. The formal research and spatial qualities proposed by these allegories of the future permute the user’s experience into an experiment transgressing the architectural space to produce a reflection on the sincere positioning of architecture in society.