Yesterday, today, tomorrow...
Imagine, think, dream, create, inspire, feel, see, read, say, touch, roam, breathe, look, discover, understand, tell, design, reveal, qualify, intensify, identify, improve, enhance, embellish , enrich, draw, make, manufacture, accompany, preserve, weave, listen, free, balance, liberate, open, accept, embrace, appropriate, engage, influence, amplify, surprise, return, divert, stir, transform, tenderise , thrill, reinvent, preserve, share, savour, offer, cherish, protect, include, live, celebrate, love… the City.
"The notion of pleasure, in architecture as in urban planning, is essential. “
"These words from Tania Concko are echoed in each of the projects she designs with her team. Her unfailing commitment, her rare attention to places and people, her ability to immerse herself in the essence of the contrasting territories in which she works, in order to better reveal their identity, make up the singular figure of an architecture and urban planning agency whose approach is intimately linked, and with great relevance, to the present times. It is a pleasure to be able to salute the vigour of a talent that restores meaning and a future to our cities, which are cluttered with empty or disjointed forms and prey to the most unfounded speculation.
Delphine Costedoat and Michel Jacques in "Territoires en Mouvement". Arc-en-Rêve.
BUILDING TO MAKE SENSE ...
Building must be an act of commitment in order to "make city"...
This is a posture that TCAU places at the centre of the processes of dynamics and success of the districts, the question of "commitment" inseparable from the "balance" of the roles and actors of the City, between public authorities, private individuals, urban planners, architects and other actors involved in the construction.
What answers do we bring to the mutation of the territories, if we want to transcribe the significant developments and the formidable evolution over the last few decades of our ways of living, working, consuming and entertaining; if we want to create the generous conditions we desire for an open society of solidarity and quality urban lifestyles?
Thinking about these objectives means, first and foremost, thinking about and addressing people, drawing a cross-section of present and future communities through urban and architectural projects.
Designing projects that will integrate multiple programs, diverse atmospheres and densities, varied types of housing, rich and complex relationships between the different elements of these programs, collective spaces invested with a real urban dynamic, growing appropriation by the users and the uses of the residents.
Creating "value" in areas that are sometimes neglected, such as large housing estates, but also areas subject to flooding, industry or marked by traffic flows.
Create, in new or existing neighbourhoods, housing for desirable urban metropolises, imagine innovative housing offering real qualities of life, integrate them into the sustainable vision of welcoming, attractive and above all "balanced" urban neighbourhoods between : city, nature, resilience, varied densities and intensities, sober diversity and inclusive mix...
The question of multiple balances being at the heart of the new challenges of the dynamics of "living in the city today...", in order to create the real conditions for social diversity, conviviality, pleasure of living and well-being in the city...
MANTRA
The city, the architecture, must not deny difficulties and constraints, but on the contrary, transform them into opportunities. "Light exists in darkness. In the light exists the darkness. They depend on each other as a step forward depends on the step before”. San Do Kai.
A Chinese word perfectly sums up this posture in our approach, meaning both "crisis or danger" and "chance or opportunity": Wei-Chi...
ATTITUDE
- To immerse in our environment of Amsterdam, a creative city that inspires by its open-mindedness, free thinking, adaptability.
- To allow ourself real freedom of design
- To free ourself from preconceptions and conventions
- To question , to interrogate, to challenge , to open up possibilities...
- To take a curious, 'critical' and generous look... see 'big'.
- To commit ourself to contribute to the construction of "a better world”
- To embrace emotions, beauty, poetry, sensitivity, essence...
- To draw inspiration from Art
- To reconnect with design in close collaboration with artists and craftsmen
- To enjoy working, creating together and having fun...
- To exchange, debate, positively confront ideas and approaches
- To mix cultures and change paradigms ...
LIVE-LAB
Simultaneous reflection, research and application
Faithful to its North European roots, where the "planning" of the city may seem at first sight more conceptual and theoretical, TCAU bases its proposals for the making of the city above all on crossed urban strategies, taking support from reality to act more effectively and thus enabling its partners to "do" with the complementarity of their "knowledge".
Together, we take risks, we do things, even if we make mistakes. We act...
Rather than a laboratory of conceptual ideas, TCAU develops the tools of an operational methodology, applied simultaneously to the urban and architectural projects it designs, a "live-lab" that inevitably links its multi-scalar reflections to the restructuring and strategic mutations of the territories, particularly in Europe. Its projects, anchored in these metropolitan sites, give concrete expression to the agency's active participation in research on its favourite subjects: urban density, changing lifestyles, climate change, well-being and quality of life, social mix and inclusion.
The "live-lab" is also a transversal conception with other disciplines which TCAU regularly calls upon through external personalities: philosopher, sociologist, artist..., thus contributing to the enrichment of the agency's project culture, "the critical apprehension of urban reality" through questioning, the questioning, the look without a priori, open to the world...
© Bruit du Frigo
Kazimir Malévich / Campus de Bordeaux
Laurent GORECKI Sculptor / Lace Fence Metal work / Idris Woodroffe & Masa Travljanin Artists