Forms of Reuse – Winter school 2024 Ensa Paris-Est

This book presents the ideas, topics, and productions from the 13 workshops conducted as part of the Winter School 2024 at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Est. This immersive week-long exercise brought together 250 students from the school and from around the world to work collectively and transversally on a common theme: reuse. The book explores various pedagogical approaches based on experimentation, sensory experience, and cooperation in project making, as undertaken by the School and its teachers and researchers.
This year, the Éav&t winter-school looks at issues related to reuse, repurposing and recycling. The first method focuses on function, the second on form, the third on matter, but they all structure a more indulgent approach to the material heritage that surrounds us. These processes are all methods and techniques for reclaiming waste, commitments to combat obsolescence, tools for giving a second life to the objects and materials in our environment, and possible readings of the territories in which we work. While these commitments seem current and necessary, they are struggling to find a stronger relationship with the discipline of architecture. They tend to take precedence over any other aspect of design, and to be defined as sufficient for a project. The Formes du Réemploi winterschool is therefore an invitation to think collectively about the ideas and forms of re-using materials and objects from our everyday lives and seeks to confront them with formal and cultural ambitions that are more firmly rooted in the history, present and future of architecture. Associated with the notions of "as-found" and "ready-made", these processes recall the great artistic canons and allow us to take a committed aesthetic stance. Confronted with questions of construction and assembly, they point to the subject of language and suggest a new definition.