Personal Projects

Shelters

During my studies I had several opportunities to experiment with different types of shelters. At the end of my first year I built a lightweight structure that could be carried like a backpack and spanned over four meters. I got so interested in the subject that I built several other bamboo and plasters shelters by myself the following years with reclaimed materials I found around the school before they were thrown away.

The plaster shelter is designed to harvest morning dew in areas with an arid climate such as north african countries, it is anchored in the sand in order to resist sandstorms while maintaining a pleasant temperature on the inside. The Bamboo shelters were built for several musical and artistic festivals.

The first one is shaped like an icosahedron and can shelter six people and the second one is a pentakidodecahedron that can shelter ten people. While the first one is just a shelter, the second one is also an art gallery displaying triangular shaped canvases and photos.

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Dissertation on Bernard Tschumi and Gilles Deleuze

During my third year, I wrote a dissertation on the Parc de la Villette designed by Bernard Tschumi which I compared to the written work of Gilles Deleuze revolving around plan sequence shots in cinema. I chose to add a stop motion video project describing my analysis of the park through its cinematic promenade to my work.

Low Cost Lamp

During my internship at Shigeru Ban architects Europe I assisted in moving the workspace from Beaubourg to their new offices. The new model shop in which I worked was in dire need of a cheap, easy to build and efficient lamp. In order to build a large ceiling lamp I refurbished neon lights from the “Japancar” expo in which the firm had participated aswell as scrap wood from one of the models. After that I built a smaller version of the lamp for another room in the workshop. These lamps are still used in the office today.

Dissertation on positive energy housing

For my diploma dissertation I chose to study passive and positive energy housing. This dissertation explains in detail the urgency to find a new form of housing and the necessity to change the way we think about energy production and consumption. Through different study cases in Europe and Asia, I tried to show how, as architects, we could initiate these changes and create more resilient urban smartgrids relying solely on local energy production and consumption networks.

Dissertation on the impact of social, economical and environmental norms on built architecture in France and in the USA

For My Post Graduate Degree I chose to write about my experience working in the US and who it differed from what I had seen in my previous work experiences. I was baffled at the wide range of differences regarding these norms so I tried to evaluate and understand the changes that emanated from them. As a result I undertake the perilous exercise of proposing ways to go forward and pointing out lessons to learn from both countries and their respective construction traditions.

Architectural optimization tool

During My Post Graduate Diploma, a team of colleagues and I developed an architectural optimization tool that could give real time energy results for a wide range of building shapes, sizes and orientation. To do so we used a combination of Rhino, Grasshopper, Ladybug and Energy plus, all of which we managed to teach ourselves in a short amount of time. Even though our time limit didn't give us the opportunity to create a more refined end product we still proved that the concept version was viable and debugged. This project was also very interesting because it was the last in a long series of real life and virtual experimentations that taught us how to apply our theoretical knowledge to the real world.