DPEA Architecture Post-Carbone

Presentation and specifics

The DPEA Post-Carbon Architecture course is a permanent seminar designed to impart the knowledge, methods and tools needed to interpret and act upon these radical changes. The foundation of the program is a varied and progressive curriculum that draws on the fields of architecture, urban and regional planning, science, technology and construction culture.
The aim is to converge these points around four main themes: climate, bioclimatic and comfort - energy - materials, construction and realization - life and biodiversity.

Course led by Jean François Blassel (architect-engineer, Prix équerre d'argent 2017 ouvrages d'art) and Raphaël Ménard (engineer, Doctor of Architecture, President of AREP).

Teachers responsible for the 4 pillars of training

• Guillaume Meunier: climate ;
• Paul Bouet: energy;
• Jean-François Blassel: matter;
• Vincent Poilleux: living matter.

Practitioners and researchers, permanent or occasional:

• Matthieu Auzanneau, author specializing in ecology and economics, and director of the energy transition think tank The Shift Project;
• Philippe Bihouix, engineer, author of essays on environmental issues, specialist in the depletion of mineral resources and promoter of low-tech, Deputy Director of AREP;
• Nicolas Bel, founder of Topager (involved in fundamental and applied research on biodiversity and urban agriculture) and Evoloop (a company specializing in the urban and territorial circular economy);
• Elise Bon, engineer-architect, environmental director at Vinci Autoroutes
• Fanny Lopez, architectural historian, PhD, teacher, author of several books on energy landscapes, electrical infrastructures, energy autonomy, microgrids, digital infrastructures and smart city criticism.
• Bernard Plattner, associate architect at Renzo Piano Building Workshop;
• Philippe Rizzotti, architect, senior lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et de Paysage de Lille and researcher at the LéaV laboratory of the École d'Architecture de Versailles since 2021, Philippe is also scientific curator of the exhibition L'Empreinte d'un habitat - construire léger et décarboné presented in 2022 at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris.

Participants in the writing and argumentation workshop : Emmanuelle Raoul-Duval (coordinator), architect, founder of ROOM atelier d'architecture, Emma Oliveira de Carvalho, architect, graduate of the DPEA Architecture Post-Carbone and Alessandra Marcon, architect, PhD and associate researcher at the OCS/AUSser laboratory.

Participating in the graphic follow-up and elaboration of the booklets (results of the studies) : Julien Martin, graphic designer at Travaux Pratiques.

The proposed method is based on :

Retrospective and prospective

The nature, severity and outcome of crises are uncertain. We therefore base our approach on an analysis of the major developments underway, a retrospective and historical vision on the one hand, and a forward-looking one on the other, notably through the scenario method. Our aim is to develop a form of "intellectual resilience", enabling us to adapt to the variability and inconstancy of possible futures. Learning to project into the future is the prospective question underlying every project. Forcing ourselves to ask these questions: what will the project look like in mid-life? What will be its downfall? Will its components be used for other projects? We draw up flowcharts and develop a culture of life-cycle analysis. The course incorporates a writing workshop where prospective narratives and fictional programmatic environments are imagined, essential forms of muscle-building for uncertain futures.

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Knowledge, research and projects

The timetable is divided between the acquisition of knowledge and its application to operational study themes entrusted to us by real clients. This training program operates as both a Think Tank and a Do Tank on concrete issues. The immediate application of general knowledge to specific cases ensures its validation and integration into a broader research process and ongoing synthesis. Students will be strongly encouraged to read, see, listen to - and share - a wide variety of documents dealing with the full range of ecological issues - and thus build up the essential fundamental culture that underpins the essential values of architecture.

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Quantitative and qualitative

Without the means, projects remain no more than "possibly beautiful" intentions. Technical mastery and the need to put these resources into critical perspective are at the heart of our training. In addition to quality, there is also quantity. Without taking the place of engineering training, the aim is to encourage the acquisition of a scientific base and the blossoming of an appreciation of the order of magnitude of the physical phenomena brought into play by our projects. Estimating scale, mastering "fuzzy" numbers. It's not about formulas, engineering abacuses, three digits after the decimal point, or virtuoso simulations. It's about feeling your "modulor" for environmental issues, the basis on which to estimate the right proportions of sustainability. Climate-use-energy-materials diagnostics are a prerequisite for any project.

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Transcalarity and transdisciplinarity

Our studies and research have shown that project scale is not a given at the outset. The parallel investigation of the component and the city, or that of the island and territorial planning, gives rise to new and convincing strategies. Understand the nesting dolls of ecological scales and successive inclusions. Examine the physical footprint of the architectural project as its "energy watershed" and its "matter watershed". This method necessarily mobilizes multiple disciplines, reflected in the theoretical content of the course. They interact right down to the most concrete scales, and also through the implementation of prototypes. The trans-disciplinary nature of this course encourages the analysis of a wide variety of objects, other than architecture: infrastructures, energy production methods, production and transformation sites, means of transport, design.

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Tools and representations

New, high-performance tools, chosen from among the many possibilities offered by the digital transformation underway, are used in studies and research, integrating their possibilities and understanding their limits. They are added to the vast array of more traditional tools - drawings, calculations and written texts - that we use to understand, describe and communicate the intentions and content of our projects. We are committed to producing dedicated graphic tools: spatialized flows, energy harvesting maps, material supply maps... and inventing the new visual and graphic culture that represents decisive phenomena.

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Learning and transmission

The course aims to give students the knowledge and means to plan and build in a situation of ecological crisis. It also aims to give them the ability to pass on and propagate this knowledge in their turn in the various professional milieus for which they are destined: project management, contracting, business, research or teaching. The course also encourages the collective development of a critical view of so-called "green" architectural production. Finally, the course aims to promote and debate issues relating to the teaching and research of renewable and resilient architecture.

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Teaching is supported by the School's own teaching teams and those of its network of partners (École des Ponts ParisTech, IFFSTAR, DSchool, ESIEE, Efficacity research institute, Université Paris-Est, etc.).

Organization

• 2 semesters;
• 3 teaching units: Fundamentals, Theory and Seminar and Studies and Research;
• 60 ECTS ;
• 1,100 h of which 470 h supervised.

The first semester is devoted to acquiring knowledge and applying it to case studies carried out in teams, while the second semester is devoted to supervised, structured personal research leading to a dissertation. Several master classes with leading practitioners and researchers are held as part of research seminars. At the end of the course, the dissertation is presented orally to the course jury.

Admission

DPEA Architecture Post-Carbone is aimed at holders of a Bac + 5 or equivalent in the fields of territorial, urban and building design and construction (architects, engineers, landscape architects, designers, etc.) from France and abroad.
For the first eight months, the DPEA Architecture Post-Carbone requires complete availability. The second part of the course, the four months devoted to personal research, is compatible with a professional activity related to the research theme. The course is open to initial and continuing professional training.

Application documents

-A cover letter explaining the candidate's interests, motivations and intentions for the Post-Carbon Architecture course,
-a curriculum vitae,
-a portfolio of work (25 pages maximum), including all documents attesting to the candidate's experience and interest in the themes covered by the course (production of projects, work, dissertations, articles, etc.), with appendices if necessary,
-a copy of the diploma or certificate obtained.

The course requires mastery of 2D and 3D drawing tools, practical drawing skills and a good level of scientific and technical knowledge. Foreign languages may be a plus.

For foreign applicants : TCF: higher level (500 to 599 points) C1 and a mark of at least 14/20 in the written and oral tests or DALF: C1 - All documents sent in a foreign language must be translated into French.

Applications will be received and examined until the number of DPEAs has been reached. Once this limit has been reached, applications will be closed without notice.

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*Registration fees

• for individual financing (registration fee): 4,400 euros incl. VAT;
• for financing provided by an organization (OPCO, Pôle emploi...): please contact us.

Financing

All higher education establishments evaluated by the HCERES are deemed to have met the quality obligation for their entire offer. They are therefore exempt from the Qualiopi procedure for all the degrees they award. Establishments exempt from this procedure are listed by the Délégation générale à l'Emploi et à la Formation professionnelle DGEFP.

And after

DPEA Post-Carbon Architecture enables students to :

• master the tools needed to make quantitative estimates of energy flows or analyze climatic data, identify the environmental stakes involved in a project, decipher the complexity of the project and interact with the players involved, and understand the concepts of primary energy, grey energy and final energy;
• experiment with new forms of representation for exchanging and communicating complex projects, and develop the ability to work with a systemic vision on multiscalar projects (building component, building, city), adapting responses to environmental issues;
• understand the implications of material choices for a project in terms of life-cycle analysis, and how to make more environmentally-friendly choices.

DPEA Post-Carbon Architecture offers a wide range of career prospects: research through the School's laboratories or research teams (Observatoire de la condition suburbaine (UMR AUSser 3329)), or access to architectural or engineering firms, NGOs, project management, etc.