Tania Concko architectes & urbanistes

ITINERARY

Tania Concko, winner of Europan 2 competition, “Living in the city”, in 1991 on the Zaanstad site (NL) in collaboration with Pierre Gautier, has built a highly dense morsel of urbanfabric along the river.
Having graduated as a government qualified architect from the Versailles School of Architecture and as an urban planner, in 1997 Tania Concko opened an architecture and urban design studio in Amsterdam. She teaches regularly in the Netherlands at the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam and at the Technical University of Delft and in France, at the Special School of Architecture or the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture. Her approach is based on a critical understanding of an urban reality: the nature of cities, their evolution over time, the connection between architecture and art and landscape, and finally architecture as a factor of urban strategy. All these challenges form the basis of the process through which she designs her projects. Her primary objectives are to pursue the question of architecture in its urban, social and programmatic contexts and to extend her investigations into urban reality, both in Europe and outside. Applying ideas tested in the Europan project, she gives concrete form to new connections between architecture and urban planning: sometimes complicity between the two through their interweaving in intermediate spaces, sometimes their fusion in public space, and sometimes the creation of a trio with landscape as a factor of seduction.

FUSION

Mutation, the city becomes architecture, architecture becomes city.

Bordeaux (F) - Campus : full and empty

In an area that is as large as Bordeaux city centre, the challenge is to renew, open up, diversify and densify the university campus to create a neighbourhood of urban dimensions. The aim is to respond to the reality of a place by amplifying spaces, concentrating the "full" and the "empty". The empty space maintains the presence of nature in the city; the full introduces three "crossways" where public spaces and varied activities are superimposed, creating a rich and complex urban tapestry.

INDEPENDENCE

The city exists without "architecture"... architecture exists without the city.

Bègles (F) - Urban renovation

To create a "new urbanity" in a strong, contextual, original and independent identity: "urban platforms", square, compact and contrasted sculpted blocks.
The square unfolds, a taut, mineral space with incursions of water and vegetation. It multiplies into a succession of sequences and becomes dynamic with special ambiences, multiple programming, rich in its diversity.

ATTRACTION

Interposed between city and architecture is the landscape, necessarily seductive...

Paris (F) - Metamorphosis of a tower

The Périphérique, new Grand Landscape, intense dynamic of superimposed flows, monolithic shapes. Building on the territory of the Périphérique orbital highway should not mean rejecting it, but highlighting its special poetics: a multiple and simultaneous perception of space, time and movement…
These new landscapes penetrate into the building, inform, deform, sculpt its architectural form into a new perception, literally stage managing the city.

AMBIGUITY

Superimposition – collage: city, architecture and landscape, a form of simulation.

Lyon (F) - Living in a landscape

The idea of the project is to concentrate the geography of the place into a monolithic to restructure – by breaking down, by fragmenting the block – this landscape into pieces. The surfaces of the buildings, of the podium, suggest the water, pebbles and the steep slopes of the wooded banks. The light maintains the ambiguity of the transparencies, of the mirroring of materials, of shapes, of colours.
The facades resemble contemporary collages: layering effects, where a reflected mixture will create an architecture impregnated with the landscape.

Europan Generation, The reinterpreted city Catalogue
Editions: Cité de l’architecture and Europan, May 2007
224 colour pages, bilingual English/French


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