EVS-LAURe

EVS-LAURe for Environment City Society - Lyon Architecture Urban Planning Research brings together researchers from various disciplines (architecture, humanities and social sciences, and engineering sciences), practitioners involved in research, and doctoral architects. 
Founded in 2014, LAURe is the result of the transformation of the laboratoire d’Analyse des Formes - LAF, which was created 25 years ago. LAURe joined the CNRS's joint research unit UMR 5600 Environment, City and Society.

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

Research at EVS-LAURe focuses on six areas that address the complexity of processes. Each area examines how to design architectural projects, today and tomorrow, and is linked to the master's programmes run with MAP-ARIA members.

Alternative architectures, emerging strategies and practices

This theme aims to more effectively link the profession and science through the prism of ‘architectural research’, which they share and even compete over. As in the past, experiences of hybridisation between research and design will be useful both to teacher-researchers (scientific communications and publications) and to practitioners who wish to develop a ‘research and development’ approach in their agencies or design offices.

Architecture, resources and resilience

This theme draws on the concepts of resources and resilience to examine how architectural research addresses the challenges of ecological, energy and sustainability transitions and the Anthropocene. This theme hypothesises that the upheavals in the architectural professions 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 themes of this theme. The multiplicity of scales and situations between the universal and the particular implies situated approaches: localised fields, empirical and theoretical approaches, and diversity of scientific output.

Collaborative experimentations for tomorrow

This theme explores experimentation as a process, object and posture. In particular, it proposes to analyse the responses proposed by spatial design actors in the face of social and environmental changes by looking at their productions, innovations, adaptations, adjustments and renewals. What is at stake for the actors involved in these experimental collaborations and collaborative experiments (project owners, companies, industries, manufacturers, local authorities, experts, residents)? Alongside this fundamental research, action research is also carried out within this area, adopting a forward-looking approach to adapt spatial design to climate change, with “climate” understood in the sense of both meteorology and the socio-political and moral atmosphere.

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

This research area aims to re-examine early modern architectural and urban theories centred on the trans-scalar dimension of architecture and their contemporary extensions, analyse the challenges of river basin development and their impact in terms of the epistemology of architectural design, compare European river situations, and explore the links between human settlements and the life sciences.

Heritages, theories and creation

This theme examines the place of architectural and urban heritage in contemporary dynamics, questioning in particular the issues raised by intervention on existing structures and the modalities of mutability and “recycling” of architecture and urban complexes. In this perspective, particular attention is paid to the study of sustainability issues and the underlying theoretical questions raised in particular by contemporary issues relating to the future of architectural objects or urban complexes.

Inhabited landscapes: from architecture to territories

Starting from the interrelationship between architecture, landscape and territories, this theme aims to transcend disciplinary divides in order to question the supposed oppositions between the built and the living, the building and the territory, the metropolis and its outskirts. In the Anthropocene era, landscape invites architects to rethink humanity in its environments at all scales and to reassess our relationship with nature. Landscape invites us to consider aesthetics, experience and figures together, as well as the visible and the invisible, from the ground to the horizon. It also allows us to re-examine resources (materials, know-how, energies, cultures, economies, etc.), ecology, biodiversity, from the common to the intimate.