Jacques Ferrier - From infrastructure to sensual city

The pleasure that the daily experience of cities can give has to be reconquered as an essential and vital asset of our urban lives. The need to reconsider urban infrastructure in a sustainable approach is an opportunity to place humans at the center of all new projects.

The functional city, through its desire for absolute control of atmosphere and ambiance, has placed itself in a situation where it is repeating and reproducing the same urban situations worldwide, side-lining any possibility of improvisation: the city without qualities is everywhere, and residents' ability to appropriate the city is nowhere to be seen.

Today, we need to invent a new contract between nature and technology: a contract where the experience of urban dwellers constitutes the core value, with the aim of once again discovering the sensual experience of the city – essential for the fulfillment of all human lives.

The design of cities not only has to achieve goals in terms of sustainable efficiency, but it must be informed by a new and richer relationship with citizens. The architect's role is not merely to accompany reality; instead, as in all the arts, it is to give reality a new appearance and to open unexpected ways of appropriation so that people learn to look at -and use - it in a new way.

Ferrier Marchetti Studio doesn't think of architecture as just designing objects but imagining and putting in place the multiple relationships these objects are likely to create.