The Arts of the Environment

Du 03.02.2025
au 07.02.2025
workshop
experimentation

Every year, the school organises a week-long Winter School between semesters, bringing together more than 400 students to address a common shared theme. Open to students from the school as well as other French and international institutions, this week of collective experimentation provides an opportunity to explore architecture, cities and territories alongside professionals and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds: architects, designers, artists, photographers, urban planners, researchers, etc.

For the 2026 edition, the school has entrusted the curatorship of its Winter School to Vanessa Pointet & Thibaut Pierron, architects and co-founders of the Sub agency, who have chosen The Arts of the Environment as their theme.

At the crossroads of the liberal arts, mechanical arts and fine arts, The Arts of the Environment questions the place and role of architecture in the acclimatisation, cultivation and domestication of our surroundings. Interweaving imagination and measurement, the 16 workshops selected following an international call for applications invite students to explore, in an experimental way, a unique aspect of the concept of environmental architecture. The workshops will allow bachelor's and master's degree participants to discover a variety of media, including models, installations, podcasts, fanzines, cartography, performances and microarchitectures.

Description of the Winter School 2026 workshops

01. Géo-cosmologies
by Francelle Cane and Laura Spozio

Natural resources and their extraction sites constitute the ground level of the built world, while the scientific knowledge derived from them is often produced far from their geographical contexts. Geo-cosmologies undertakes an exploration of fragments from the General Geology collection at the National Museum of Natural History to analyse how narratives and knowledge are constructed through the museum's material and spatial displays. The workshop highlights the continuity between the materials of geological objects and those used in public Parisian buildings, which come from the same deposits.
This connection critically questions the change in status of matter—from geological substance to symbolic material—and how museography constructs an interpretation of resources, revealing the geopolitical, economic, and environmental entanglements that structure our building practices and our terrestrial cosmologies.

Supervised by Francelle Cane and Laura Spozio

Francelle Cane is an architect and researcher who graduated from ENSA Versailles.
Curator of the Luxembourg pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, her research explores the notion of ruins through a critical spatial approach combining soil studies, territorial and colonial policies. She's teaching design studio since 2021, first at UniLu and then at La Cambre Horta (ULB).

Graduate in Photography and Contemporary Artistic Practices (HEAD, Geneva), Laura Spozio explores the construction of a “scientific vision” of nature and the relationships between institutional knowledge and individual experience. Her work questions the devices that shape our perception of living beings and our ways of interacting with them.

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02. In-N-Out
by Romain Curnier Mercury and Roxane Laborde

Modern societies have constantly classified, organized, and represented their environment. Through these practices of knowledge and shaping, a conception of
“nature” emerges that is less an objective reality than a cultural construct—a reflection of the ways in which each society thinks about itself and its place in the world.
Curiosity cabinets, world theaters, large globes, greenhouses, aquariums, national parks, dioramas... each of these bears witness to processes of “staging” as much as “boxing in” the environment: ecological displacements, the temptation of globality, artifacts and classification, the invention of wilderness. All of these architectures reflect the desire to domesticate and control the external environment.
This workshop explores these acts of capturing and representing. Collectively, an iconographic archive of these architectures will be created. Then, through the publication of fanzines, each student will offer a sensitive and critical reading of this archive, questioning our contemporary relationship with the environment and the forms of knowledge that shape it.

Supervised by Romain Curnier Mercury and Roxane Laborde

Romain Curnier Mercury is an architect with a background in anthropology and environmental humanities (SPEAP, Sciences Po Paris & Post-Master LAA ENSAPLV). In 2023, he founded the RCM office in Paris. He teaches at EPFL and IMVT.

Roxane Laborde is an architect. She develops a practice focused on the transformation of the built environment and contemporary forms of dwelling. As an Associate teacher at ENSASE and an independent researcher at HEAD – Geneva, she connects design, research, and pedagogy around issues of rehabilitation and social and ecological transitions.

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03. Plan Plant House
by Tiago P. Borges

Plant-centred architecture lies at the heart of the relationship between the natural and built environment. The world's vegetable order and history were disrupted by colonial extraction, when plants were displaced from their context and forced to acclimatise. For plants, it was a matter of survival; for architecture, which is largely anthropocentric, it was a period of experimentation. Nevertheless, this process gave rise to a major typological revolution in occidental architecture: the modern greenhouse.
Plan Plant House explores the potential of architecture for plants and seeks to reposition plant life at the centre. The aim is to design an experimental house for a plant. Light, temperature, humidity and substrate will become building blocks in an environment made of symbiotic relationships. Between micro-architecture and micro-climates, how can architecture accommodate a living being with its own intelligence and sensitivity?

Supervised by Tiago P. Borges

Tiago P. Borges is an architect, scholar and educator at EPF Lausanne. He obtained his doctoral degree on architecture history and theory at EPFL. His research covers the dynamics of types and typological studies, with a primary focus on the historical interplay between greenhouses and domestic spaces. Currently, he heads the design studio Greenhouse Studies at EPFL as post-doctoral fellow.

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04. Sensing Station: Hack the Smart City
by Alice Loumeau and Valentin Bansac

The understanding of our built and natural environments are increasingly influenced by the deployment of a multitude of sensors, technical objects that amplify our ability to detect. The smart city offers a vision in which data is the sole medium, encapsulated as material for projecting urban transformations. This workshop offers a sensory exploration of the area around the school, as an attempt to “hack” the data that currently makes up the city towards an approach that perceives and feels, rather than simply detects.
What do we measure, with which tools? Which entities are allowed to participate? As an example, the understanding of climate not only exists through a network of systems and devices, but via cultural, social, and ecological knowledge. More than a sum of data, the city is a hyperobject made up of contradictions and palimpsests, difficult to entirely grasp and in constant reconfiguration.

Supervised by Alice Loumeau and Valentin Bansac

MATTERS.xyz is a tentacular collective endeavor that explores new territorial narratives through creative research, text, installation and exhibition. Mobilizing interdisciplinary alliances and multimedia projects, their investigations portray the entanglement of human and non-human trajectories through political and ecological controversies.

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05. Colliding Landscapes
by Pierre Marmy and Arnaud Bostelmann

Everlasting small irruptions, devastating traces. Edges, lines, or margins that bypass controlled spaces, struggling to contain what is nevertheless bound to exist.
The workshop focuses on these contemporary symptoms of the territory. Between material and immaterial, construction and decay, order and chaos, the banality produced by the continuous transformation of urban and natural space becomes the target of our narratives. By revealing these subtle yet omnipresent indications, camouflaged by norms, filters, flows, or other incursions within a regulated environment—the workshop invites participants to construct a visual narrative in the form of a scrapbook, through the production and transformation of images. By observing and documenting zones of tension around the school, Colliding Landscapes explores these collateral spaces where the boundaries between the artificial and the natural blur.

Supervised by Pierre Marmy and Arnaud Bostelmann

Pierre Marmy is an architect and photographer based between Lausanne and Zurich. He works as a teaching assistant at ETH Zurich and co-founded the collective la–clique. His practice explores urban narratives and imaginaries through images and collective projects. He has published or co-published "l’autre Berne", "KUSHIROID", and "ELECTRYONE".

Arnaud Bostelmann is an architect and photographer living and working in Zurich. Parallel to his work as an assistant at ETH Zurich, he practices independently image and architecture considered as projects. His approach focuses ambivalently on human traces and built environments. He has recently been published in «Peter Thomann: Hors Piste» and «ELECTRYONE».

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06. Theater of Thermodynamics
by Lewis Horkulak and Nicolas König

Every human, building and action participates in a continuous exchange of energy – radiating heat, circulating air and setting matter in motion to sustain the metabolism of our built environment. Most of this energy serves a single purpose – to warm, illuminate, or move – before it quietly dissipates. Its residues remain unseen: waste heat, exhaust air, cyclical movements. But what happens after its task is done – what could it become? The Theater of Thermodynamics invites participants to sense, capture, and restage these flows through site-specific prototypes and performative installations. Together we will second-harvest excess energy around the campus – rerouting, recovering, and transforming it into spatial and sensory experiences. Grounded in the first law of thermodynamics and informed by cumulative energy systems, the workshop reimagines energy as a dynamic medium of design, where movement, temperature, and humidity become transformative agents in architecture.

Supervised by Lewis Horkulak and Nicolas König

Lewis Horkulak studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin, Bauhaus University Weimar, and ETH Zurich. His work has been recognized with awards including the Foundation Award and the Vectorworks Scholarship, and has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture Zurich and the Design Biennale Zurich. In 2024 he co-founded the architectural practice 820 together with Nicolas König.

Nicolas König studied architecture at the University of the Arts Berlin, the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, and ETH Zurich. His master’s thesis «The Fulfillment Paradox» received the ETH Medal and nominations for the SIA Prize and RIBA Silver Medal. In 2024, he co-founded the Zurich-based architectural practice 820 with Lewis Horkulak and was awarded the German Design Newcomer Award.

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07. Pique-nique Redux
by Anton Schneider

A one-week seminar exploring the spatial and social dimensions of the picnic.
Originating as medieval feasts, picnics evolved from aristocratic rituals to democratic gatherings. The term pique-nique—“to pick at little things” once described bourgeois potlucks; after the French Revolution, public access to royal parks transformed outdoor dining into a symbol of equality and intimacy. Today, the picnic blurs lines between public and private, formal and informal, designed and improvised. Through the simple act of sharing space, food, and posture, Pique-Nique Redux examines how collective leisure reveals architecture’s social and spatial dynamics, using the picnic blanket as both object and stage for inquiry.

Supervised by Anton Schneider

Anton Schneider, architect and co-founder of >Schneider Luescher in Los Angeles, focuses on materiality, detail, and spatial experience in local and international projects. He taught architectural design at Cal Poly Pomona and is a licensed architect in California.

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08. La fabrique du commun — Ateliers de prototypages d’espaces partagés
by Marion Tissot and Catherine Jauffred

The proposal involves engaging students in creating shared spaces within a university.
These spaces will be activated through immersion and surveys, which will lead to the creation of collective fanzines documenting the process. Common spaces are a lever for social and ecological change in transitional urban planning policies. Campuses call for this mode of endogenous transformation of spaces to open up to creation, encourage participation, break down barriers, and use art and architecture as a lever to activate vacant or undefined spaces and connect them to ecology. Yes We Camp and Ancoats are joining forces to offer facilitation sessions on creating shared spaces and understanding their genealogy and dynamics.

Supervised by Marion Tissot and Catherine Jauffred

An architect by training, formerly responsible for the development of common areas at Les Grands Voisins (Paris) and coordinator of the Les Amarres temporary occupation project (Paris), she focuses now on regulations, space planning, and architecture applied to transitional urban planning based on a circular economy approach, reuse, and participatory workshops.

Trained in ethnology and regional planning, she was responsible for heritage development for an inter-municipal authority before taking over as director of a local development association. She conducts ethnographic surveys and organizes exhibitions alongside her work as a journalist and editor-in-chief of a local history publication. She co-founded three third places.

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09. Archéologie des formes
by Marlène Leroux and Francis Jacquier

We inherit a resource. We understand that it is constraining. We grasp that it is precious.
This is about exploring our relationship with raw material — an unfiltered expression of the natural environment.
Starting from a raw block of steatite, the students will investigate — like an archaeology of forms — to rediscover the elegance of a preexisting figure and stage it within its new, now artificial, environment.

Supervised by Marlène Leroux and Francis Jacquier

ATELIER ARCHIPLEIN, jointly headed by Marlène Leroux and Francis Jacquier, is based in Geneva. With 15 years of experience, Atelier Archiplein is regularly involved in large-scale projects in France, Switzerland, and China. For them, building with natural materials is an opportunity to challenge the current mode of building production considering ongoing environmental and climate issues.

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10. Sections
by Maxime Pauzon and Rodrigue Lombard

The Eastern Paris gather layers of time and matter; the contemporary campus, the industrial ruins of Noisiel, the park’s soils, the construction sites of the new town. These strata coexist without ever meeting. The workshop invites participants to cut through them: not a geological core, but a sensitive one, compacted from collected fragments; dust, plaster, debris, waste, plants, foams, papers. This imaginary stratigraphy reads the territory as a recomposed memory of Champs-sur-Marne. The compacted, stratigraphic sculpture becomes a physical archive, a collective act, a critical matrix. It moves beyond soil science into the field of architecture: thinking space through its density, and shaping the common out of fragments.ragment.

Supervised by Maxime Pauzon and Rodrigue Lombard

Maxime Pauzon is an architect, graduated with honors from ENSAL and ENSAPLV, and laureate of Échelle Un 2024. After ten years directing major public projects at R Architecture, he co-founded Pauzon Filliatre Architectes. His work seeks to reveal and clarify, to question use, and to intensify the desire to inhabit.

Rodrigue Lombard, architect graduated with honors, trained in France and internationally (ENSAPLV Paris, FAU São Paulo). He collaborated with the Atelier International du Grand Paris and then with STAR in the Netherlands and joined R architecture as a project director, where he leads major projects for the Ministry of Culture and the Maison de la Radio among others.

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11. Clouds
by Tanguy Auffret Postel and Katell Mallédan and Ansgar Stadler

Clouds proposes to envision architecture as an art of producing clouds — devices that modulate light and shadow to generate new climates. The broad genealogy of architectural clouds draws from works as diverse as Giulio Romano’s frescoes at the Palazzo Te and Graham Stevens’s desert inflatables. As the limits of interior climate control become increasingly apparent, might the cloud inspire strategies for new habitable spaces? Exploring this atmospheric and pictorial figure invites both tectonic and celestial imaginaries. In the resulting bestiary of clouds, representation and space intertwine to outline a new ecology of shadows for the open environments of tomorrow.

Supervised by Tanguy Auffret Postel and Katell Mallédan and Ansgar Stadler

Tanguy Auffret Postel is an architect. A graduate of ENSAB and ENSPV, he lives and works in Lausanne where he founded the firm M—AP architectes. Alongside his practice, he is involved in teaching and research. He is currently conducting doctoral research at EPFL on the relationship between Swiss architecture and the emergence of insulated envelopes at the end of the 20th century

Katell Mallédan is an architect and urban planner. A graduate of ENSA Bretagne and ENSA Paris La Villette, she founded M—AP architectes in Lausanne. She co-directs Ville en tête, an association working to raise awareness of built culture among all audiences. She regularly leads workshops and contributes to various committees and juries.

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12. Accumulation
by Marion Mouny and Clément Périssé

Architecture can be seen as a receptacle of knowledge: it transforms raw matter into spaces, uses, and forms. In this sense, architecture is always both a storage of information and of material — an accumulation condensed within its structure, its techniques, and its gestures.
As a complex ecosystem, the forest embodies a model of network, material storage, and resource production. It has also, historically, been a major source of architectural materials and, as such, will serve as the case study for this workshop — a link between the living and architecture.
The forest, like traditional storage spaces (granaries, wine cellars), represents a form of the commons that rampant capitalism has either destroyed or displaced. By studying and drawing forestry practices, storage spaces, and related tools, this workshop aims to bring storage, both physical and of data — back to the forefront, at a time when resource depletion demands greater care and a renewed culture of sharing.

Supervised by Marion Mouny and Clément Périssé

Marion Mouny is an architect, horticulturist and cofounder of MMNK - architecture of territory. She conducts architecture, design and urban planning projects, as well as research focusing on the repair of existing structures, materials, material management and the question of time. At the same time, she is involved in horticultural and forestry projects. These two practices feed off each other.

Clément Périssé is architect, cofounder of Cookies Architecture. Cookies operates at the intersection of art and architecture, fostering a dialogue between the conceptualization of exhibitions, and the spatialization of ideas. Through exhibition-making, material research, and cultural strategy, Cookies explores an architecture that is speculative, sustainable, and socially responsible.

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13. Architectural Orthotics
by Jonas Tratz

The notion of Architectural Orthotics explores the interface between care and construction. Much like an orthosis supports and re-enables a weakened body,
architectural orthotics engage with the existing structural fabric not by replacing it, but by carefully augmenting it. Within this paradigm, sustainability is redefined as a form of architectural empathy — a commitment to preserve, strengthen, and adapt rather than to erase.
In the context of retrofitting, such constructive orthoses operate as precise, site-specific interventions: subtle prosthetic reinforcements that address structural fragility while enabling new forms of inhabitation. Beyond the technical, they propose a new aesthetic of repair — an expression of care inscribed into material form. This aesthetic resists the smoothness of the new, celebrating instead the calibrated dialogue between the existing and the added.
Structures are to be expored not as static artefacts but as evolving bodies — capable of transformation, adaptation, and resilience. Through Architectural Orthotics, the act of mending becomes an architectural language in itself: one that expresses both continuity and transformation, both history and forwardness.

Supervised by Jonas Tratz

FAKT approaches design as a research-based practice situated at the intersection of architecture, typology, and the socio-cultural context. At its core lies an interest in spatial adaptability and open systems — architectures capable of transformation rather than fixation. The work emerges through interdisciplinary and often collaborative constellations, continuously informed by academic engagement, including guest professorships and teaching positions at TU Berlin, DIA Dessau, MSA Münster, and the University of Trento.
FAKT is the editor of several publications, including Berlin Maps (Ruby Press, 2021), a member of the BDA, and a recipient of the Rome Price / Villa Massimo Fellowship 2019–2020. Recent competition successes include the Neue Architekturschule Siegen and the Community Pavilion in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort, both of which reflect the studio’s ongoing investigation into the social and material dimensions of architectural practice.

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14. The Sentence as a Space for Living
by Olivier Brossard

The proposed workshop will be a writing workshop. It will involve considering writing and architectural practices in their interactions (both existing and yet to be invented) as environmental arts, i.e. spatial arts that influence living beings . The links between writing(s) and architecture(s) are ancient and diverse, whether we think of the numerous architectural metaphors in literature or the relationship between architectural practices and different forms of writing.

Does writing about architecture and, at the same time, ‘architecting’ writing not necessarily mean thinking about our relationship with the spaces around us, does it not mean wanting to act for (and not just ‘on’) our environment? Is thinking about the continuities and porosities between writing(s) and architecture(s) not necessarily a way of thinking about the environment? How can we think about and practise ‘the sentence as a space for living’ (Renee Gladman)?

Supervised by Olivier Brossard

Olivier Brossard is a professor of American literature at Gustave Eiffel University, where he is also deputy vice-president for equality. An honorary junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2015-2020), he co-directs the Poets & Critics programme and [écritures urbaines]. Co-founder of the Franco-American association double change, he is a translator and director of the North American collection of joca seria (a publishing house specialising in literature, arts and architecture).

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15. Sound third places
by Christophe Widerski

Content coming soon

Supervised by Christophe Widerski

Christophe Widerski is a DPLG architect from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture.
He is a founding member of his own architecture studio, where he has carried out a wide range of projects, combining public facilities and private construction work.
His professional activities are complemented by teaching at the School of Architecture of the City & Territories.

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16. COSMETIC VANDALISM
by Ahmed Belkhodja

At a time when financial and energy constraints seem to be pushing much of architectural production towards beige and monastic styles, and when the “urban” has become a mere subcategory of the art market, the workshop posits that it is time for architects to take up the torch of enlightened vandalism towards our built environment. This can be done on existing structures, and with almost nothing: paint, colours, intentions, tenderness, humour, critical thinking.
The first stage of the workshop will identify public spaces of interest and create portraits of them. Collages and montages of possible interventions will then be developed, tested and staged collectively at the end of the week.

Supervised by Ahmed Belkhodja

Ahmed Belkhodja is a Swiss architect born in Lausanne in 1990. He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and ETH Zurich, and completed a PhD at the University of Porto.
Ahmed Belkhodja runs FALA in Porto with Ana Luisa Soares, Filipe Magalhães and Lera Samovich. FALA champions a resolutely optimistic approach to architecture, which has been recognised with numerous awards, publications and exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. Recently, 2G/Walther Koenig and A+U published monographs on the studio's work, and FALA received the 2020 Spotlight Award at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Ahmed Belkhodja has taught at several institutions in Europe, including HEAD–Geneva, the University of Toronto, the Royal College of Art in London, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He has presented the work of the FALA studio at numerous conferences and has been a guest critic at KTH Stockholm, IIT Chicago and ETH Zurich.
In September 2021, Ahmed Belkhodja joined ENSA Paris-Est as an associate lecturer to teach the project, particularly in the Architecture & Experience master's programme.

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