Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: ...

Where did the critical tradition of art go? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Because we know the answer. It went into spectacle. It went into finance. It got privatized, democratized, scrutinized, defunded, bureaucratized, then professionalized. The critical stick became a seductive carrot. But maybe we don’t have to see this only in terms of a fall from grace. Maybe this is the time for a long-overdue realism that an art field still in the thrall of modernist humanism struggles to avoid recognizing. Isn’t it strange how we are subjected to the most extreme aspects of this new order and yet ...

One book two projects. [Un]Plug CLa Défense, Paris, 2001 Architect: R&Sie.D/B:L, Paris Creative team: François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, Alexandre Boulin, Olivier Legrand, Gilles Desevedavy; Collaborators: Benoît Durandin, Etienne Feher, David Topanni Key dimensions: 10 000 m2. Client: EDF Design of an office building in La Défense area, Paris. Command by the research department of French Public Electricity Company (EDF), to develop a building that gains its energy from the sun. Scrambled Flat Evolene, Switzerland, 2001 Architect: R&Sie.D/B:L, Paris Creative team: François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, Alexandre Boulin, Olivier Legrand. Collaborators: Benoît Durandin, Etienne Feher, David Topanni Key dimensions: 450 m2 Creation of a farm of dwellings, of 450 m2 in a Village of Evolene, Switzerland Program: ...

This publication presents François Roche’s Water Flux, a project for a geology and glaciology museum and research centre in the Swiss Alps. Water Flux, begun in 2007 but never realized, involved digital design to control an automated manufacturing process. It was conceived as a monolithic structure in wood milled from local forests, resting on a reinforced concrete base. Roche and his office, R&Sie(n), developed the design through a digital 3D model and used parametric analysis to determine the exact structural conditions needed to realize the form. This digital information would then be applied to a milling process through computer numerical control ...

As multipurpose as a Swiss army knife, shunted back and forth every which way between art and architecture, he is at once an alibi, a foil, a spiritual father, a defeated ideologue whose scars are an atonement (the deafness, whether real or feigned – we’ll come back to it later) and rather handy… a paper architect, an ideologue, the kind of brand that keeps on giving, still legitimized by the French establishment, that funny alter cocker Yona Friedman® with the slight Slavic accent that makes you smile, whose foibles everyone forgives, since they’re so charming and “inoffensive.” Yona Friedman® is perfectly adaptable…