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Infrastructural

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Bringing architecture back to its infrastructural state is defined according to  three lines of thought: the territory, the architectural language and the economy. The first axis relates to architecture as an element of the territory regardless of its scale. It becomes an infrastructure of the landscape. The second is the relationship to architectural language and form. Architecture is reduced  to its most basic terms. In a period where a common narrative is lacking, the architectural language is in real crisis. Nakedness is to dispense with everything that obfuscates and confounds the basic ideas and shapes underneath. By replacing language with systems, the architectural project becomes a formal support for various meanings, symbols, temporality and above all a support for poetics. The last is to make an economic architecture through new aesthetic and social paradigms and a new way of approaching the project.  Through this last theme we address the issue of a possible local architecture.

Hicham Bou Akl is a graduate of the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA). where he earned his architecture degree in 2000. In 2004, he obtained a postgraduate diploma in urban design from L’ecole nationale su perieure  d’architecture de Paris Belleville, in Paris. In 2013, he co-founded Les Architectes Workshop, a Paris-based office that worked on architecture and urban design projects in Switzerland, France, and Lebanon. In 2014, Les Architectes Workshop was granted an award by Les Mai res de France and Le Pavilion de l’Arsenal, for  their urban design project entitled Un quartier peripherique aerien. In 2016, the project l’ObseNatoire cinematographique du territoire ouvert was selected to take part in the second phase of the competition Reinventer Paris, published and exhibited at Le Pavilion de !’Arsenal. Currently Hicham Bou Akl is collaborating with the Laboratoire d’Architecture in Geneva on a study of Arab metropolises for the magazine “Traceā€ in Lausanne. 
 
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