ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
ARCH 692 - PROPOSITIONS
SUMMER 2025CHRONO-SOILS: Risks, Frontiers, and Strategies for Territorial Futures
CHRONO-SOILS frames territory not as a fixed site but as a temporal condition—stratified, contingent, and in constant negotiation. Developed within the Beyond 2025 building festival, the studio brings together Michigan students and European practitioners for an intensive, two-month inquiry into resources, risk, and adaptation.
Operating between the Camargue delta and the retreating coastline of Pas-de-Calais, the work approaches soil as living matter: a medium shaped by salinization, erosion, hydrological politics, and biodiversity loss. Ground is understood as archive and agent simultaneously—material evidence of climate acceleration and a register of future possibility.
Architecture is positioned less as object production and more as strategic mediation. Projects test how design can recalibrate relationships between human and non-human systems across extended temporal horizons. Territorial frameworks and material experiments unfold in tandem, moving from systemic analysis to spatial proposition. Research, concept, development, and representation are treated as iterative phases—disciplining speculation while resisting reductive, crisis-driven responses.
Representation is central. Drawing, mapping, collage, and physical modeling operate as instruments of thought, situating tactile inquiry alongside digital techniques. The aim is the construction of legible, consequential arguments.
Led by Clément Blanchet with Eric Daniel-Lacombe and Matthieu Duperrex, and developed in partnership with ENSA Paris-La Villette, ENSA Marseille, and Leonard de Vinci, the studio establishes a comparative dialogue between American and French approaches to territorial transformation. As part of an experimental open-studio model, students work abroad while engaging global practices directly—positioning architectural education as both situated and transnational.