EVS-LAURe

EVS-LAURe for Lyon Architecture Urbanisme Recherche brings together researchers from different disciplinary fields (architecture, human and social sciences and engineering sciences), practitioners involved in research and PhD architects. 
Founded in 2014, LAURe grew out of the transformation of the Laboratoire d'Analyse des Formes - LAF created 25 years ago. LAURe has joined the UMR 5600 Environnement, Ville et Société mixed research unit of the CNRS.

EVS-LAURe has been directed since 2023 by Sandra Fiori and Théo Fort-Jacques, professor and lecturer at ENSAL.

Research within EVS-LAURe is organized around six axes that address the complexity of processes. Each axis questions how to make an architectural project, today and tomorrow, and are articulated with the master's courses carried out with MAP-ARIA members.

Alternative architectures, emerging strategies and practices

This axis aims to more effectively link the profession and science through the prism of "architectural research", which they share and even dispute. As in the past, experiments in hybridization between research and projects will be of as much use to teacher-researchers (scientific communications and publications) as to practitioners wishing to develop a "research and development"-type approach in their agencies or design offices.

Architecture, resources and resilience

This axis mobilizes the concepts of resources and resilience to question how architectural research invests the issues of so-called ecological, energy, sustainable transitions and the Anthropocene. It assumes that upheavals in the architectural profession are changing the meaning of architecture in the context of an accelerated reconfiguration of "human-nature" relationships at all spatial and temporal scales. The study of the interrelationships between technology, politics and habitats, which are reshaping and even displacing architectural design and projects, is one of the major entries in this axis. The multiplicity of scales and situations between the universal and the particular implies situated approaches: localized fields, empirical and theoretical approaches, diversity of scientific productions.

Collaborative experimentation(s) for tomorrow

This axis explores experimentation as a process, object and posture. In particular, it proposes to analyze the responses proposed by spatial design players in the face of social and environmental change, looking at their productions, innovations, adaptations, adjustments and renewals. What do the players involved in these experimental collaborations and collaborative experiments (project owners, companies, sectors, manufacturers, local authorities, experts, residents) have at stake? Alongside this fundamental research, action research is also supported by this axis, adopting a forward-looking posture to adapt spatial design to climate change; "climate" being understood in the sense that it relates as much to meteorology as to the socio-political and moral atmosphere.

Rivers and urbanity: architectural theory in the light of contemporary geographical issues

This axis intends to carry out a rereading of architectural and urban theories of early modernity centered on the transcalar dimension of architecture and their contemporary extensions, an analysis of the issues involved in the development of river territories and their impact in terms of the epistemology of the architectural project, a comparison of European river situations and an exploration of the links between human settlements and the life sciences.

Heritages, theories and creation

This axis examines the place of architectural and urban heritage in contemporary dynamics, questioning in particular the issues raised by intervention on the existing, the modalities of mutability as well as the "recycling" of architecture and urban ensembles. In this perspective, particular attention is paid to the study of sustainability issues and the underlying theoretical questions raised in particular by contemporary issues concerning the future of architectural objects or urban ensembles.

Inhabited landscapes: from architecture to territories

Starting from the interrelation between architecture, landscape and territories, this axis aims to go beyond disciplinary divides to question supposed oppositions between the built and the living, the edifice and the territory, the metropolis and its distant surroundings. In the age of the Anthropocene, landscape invites architects to rethink man in his environment at every scale, and to reassess our relationship with nature. Landscape invites us to think together about aesthetics, experience and figures, as well as the visible and the invisible, from the ground to the horizon. It also allows us to reinterrogate resources (materials, know-how, energies, cultures, economies...), ecology and biodiversity, from the commonplace to the intimate.