Eric Cassar
埃里克 ▪ 卡蕯 – Eric Cassar is an architect, urban planner, engineer, author and founder of Arkhenspaces, an architecture, urbanism and design studio founded in Paris in 2005.
For more than twenty years, he has been developing a practice and research at the intersection of architecture, ecology, digital technologies and sensitive perceptions. His work explores the relationships between built forms, uses, digital environments, climate, living systems and contemporary imaginaries.
Winner of the Académie des Beaux-Arts Prize in architecture (2010) and of the European Smart City Innovation Grand Prize – Le Monde (2017), he is notably the author of The case for subtle ar(t)chitecture.
He regularly teaches, writes and lectures in France and internationally on sensitive environments, new ways of living and the contemporary city.
Background
Architect DPLG and engineer graduated from ESTP, Eric Cassar discovered architecture after a scientific and technical education combined with an early passion for the arts and avant-garde poetry.
In 2005, he founded Arkhenspaces in Paris, a studio developing projects, research and experiments from design to the urban scale.
His work advocates an architecture conceived as a sensitive experience: an architecture to be lived, attentive to the body, perceptions, rhythms, atmospheres and relationships between inhabitants, landscapes and living systems. Adapted to uses and contexts, it is conceived as evolutive and capable of transforming over time. It seeks to create active and interactive environments attentive to contemporary transformations and ecological balances.
For more than twenty years, he has developed both theoretical and operational research around the concept of n-spaces: intertwined material and immaterial environments extending architecture into multiple dimensions.
Architecture is no longer considered solely as the organisation of space, but as the coordination of space-time — or even n-spaces — combining through digital technologies relationships between inhabitants and environments that are both near and distant, physical and virtual.
Within Arkhenspaces, he has imagined nearly one hundred architectural projects and experiments — housing, museums, workspaces, transport infrastructures and urban projects — including several built works in France and abroad.
His projects and research have been exhibited, published and presented internationally. Alongside his architectural practice, Eric Cassar develops activities in writing, teaching and lectures focused on the sensitive city, hybrid buildings and new ways of living.
Since 2014, he has notably continued his research on contemporary forms of housing through several prospective projects, including Habiter l’infini (Inhabiting Infinity), which later evolved into the Îlot Actif (Active Block), currently pursued through a research and experimentation chair being developed with ESTP.
Selected references
- Founder of Arkhenspaces (Paris, 2005)
- Architect DPLG, ESTP engineer, SFU urban planner
- Author of The case for subtle ar(t)chitecture
- Pierre Cardin Prize – Académie des Beaux-Arts (2010)
- Lecture tour in Taiwan on intelligent green buildings; invited by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts to build and present Interstice space, an urban heterotopia (2013)
- European Smart City Innovation Grand Prize – Le Monde (2017)
- Visiting lecturer (ESTP, Institut Supérieur de l’Environnement…)
- Columnist for Chroniques d’architecture
- Lectures and talks: TEDx Lyon, Montréal Connect, Tianjin University, EPFL, Rome, Bordeaux, Taipei, Kaohsiung…