School's Out! #36 with Francois Decoster

For this School Out! evening, François Decoster talked about the work of L’AUC, with a focus on their long-term project Lyon Part-Dieu, the regeneration and development of the business district from the 1960-1970s and the Lyon metropolitan hub. 

In his talk Francois explained how architecture can be more than parachuting shiny objects into the city. Not the object or its iconography is the object of his fascination, but the city as a living organism of forms, spaces, shapes and people, in which architecture should be precisely inserted. His office, L’AUC, finds urbanity anywhere, not just in the precious inner cities, but also in the post war banlieues and the post-industrial wastelands on the edges of the metropolis. Their mission is to understand the contemporary city, through architecture.

After the talk by François, we screened a short film, handpicked curator and filmmaker Jord den Hollander, followed by drinks and aftertalk.

About L’AUC
L’AUC is a Paris-based international architecture and urbanism firm founded in 1996. The design office operates at all scales of urban design, including strategic, territorial, and local planning, urban studies, development projects and urban regeneration. In their approach architecture is seen as a way to understand the city and create new attractive points and clusters within the existing urban fabric. The office has won different prices for their innovative practice, for instance the Palmarès National des Jeunes Urbanistes in 2005. L’AUC was one of the ten teams commissioned for the ‘Grand Paris’ competition launched by the French government in 2008. Recent projects on the productive city involve a research by design trajectory for the IABR-2016 projectatelier Rotterdam and the urban regeneration project for Fives Cail Babcock where a disused factory site was transformed into a mixed zone for housing, economic and public facilities.