Shared architecture

Architecture isn’t an autonomous discipline. Its purpose is to aggregate an array of perceptions of an increasingly complex world. This is why AIA Life Designers stands for a culture of cooperative and collective intelligence. In terms of projects, our crosscutting approach rests on a multiplication of skills as well as on pluridisciplinarity. Setting aside their egos, our architects, engineers, economists, urban planners, landscapers and site supervisors collaborate in an atmosphere of open, interactive and diverse pedagogy. They all stand for an underlying concept of shared architecture framed by these nine markers:

Context

A project transforms the pre-existing, all architecture is always a real-life exercise. The nature and specificity of the dialogue with the site are crucial in terms of the intensity of the building’s engagement with its surroundings and users. This mutual enrichment will result in the emergence of a new context.

Resilience

Architecture is bigger than us. Besides its usage, it must be reversible and integrate all potential energy transition scenarios. This means prioritising the strength and permanence of its structure, as well as its core elements: light, air and spatiality.

Invitation

Continuity between town and architecture is achieved via a web of invitations and relations within the building: ratio relationships between the inside and the outside, easiness and porosity, link to the land and topography, threshold graduation, identification of the location… The value of the relationships is a testament to the attention transferred upon the person about to enter and occupy the building.

Journey

Architecture is perceived via the inside. It is an experience of vacuum, of transparency, and spatiality. Questioning the journey of an individual within a physical space is tantamount to an acknowledgment of perceived and experienced movement: a quest for scenography, a pursuit of a script of actions, purposes and motions. This area of intervention enables us to overcome the restrictions of functionality.

Living

Besides the programme, all spaces must be developed with the act of living in mind. Living conjures up the idea of comfort, pleasure and generosity. Architectures must speak to life styles, it must transform, own and allow as many forms of occupation as possible. Via his movements, his actions, his feelings, the inhabitant asks fundamental spatial questions. He extends the history of architecture in a fascinating manner.

Imagination

Every project must be able to bring about a shared fantasy and breathe life into a collective. Architecture is a way to lightly touch this delicate aspiration. Users and clients both participate in the project and produce it together, thereby sharing and anchoring this shared fantasy.

Constructive thinking

The actual physical production of a work encompasses its sustainability, mutability, as well as savings on materials and means in order to grant as much freedom as possible to the user in the long run. The thinking goes further than just form or image, it seeks to build from the inside. There must be a direct link, a true match between the thought process of building and the act of living.

Nature

Nature is a steadfast ally of architecture. The space devoted to landscape, to plants, must be developed in parallel to the project, and not in its wake, as a crude act of greening. This double approach must draw its strength from the relationships and exchanges between architecture and nature in order to give biodiversity a chance to survive, soils a chance to regenerate and the environment a chance to broaden.

Innovation

Man is at the centre of innovation. Five transitions characterise the sustainable city: humanistic, environmental, energetic, digital and economic. Depending on which aspects we are dealing with, we will approach innovation through different prisms: technology, construction, methodology and society. Indeed, we will adapt innovation to purposes and desires as well as to the added value it represents for the daily life of human beings and their use of space.