My Parisian apartment overlooks a little courtyard, surrounded by high walls on all four sides. Home for 55 days, I got used to following the sun’s path, observing how the wind blows and the water flows along the façade to reach the vegetation, watching birds and insects ephemerally pass through the foliage. Day after day, every surface started to expand. The concrete became a large dry desert, the foliage turned into a dense shaded forest and the façades into high impassable cliffs. Following Marcovaldo’s paths exploring his urban environment (1), each part of this tiny courtyard started to resonate with a much larger geography. Through my motionless journey, the courtyard became a vast landscape, made of an infinity of smaller environments.
The constant interactions of humidity and temperature between air, buildings and vegetation creates many singular environments, or milieux (2). Each of them is a unique association in between architecture, nature and geographical forces to produce a series of interconnected climatic conditions. The revealing of the existing interactions at a micro scale invite us to rethink our cities at a broader scale, starting from its interstices and porosity where the paths of rainwater, the turbulence of the winds, the process of fertilization of the ground, and the seasonal variations of the air mass design our daily urban experience. Instead of designing our public spaces to ensure social distance, we might consider first the interconnections and interdependencies in between the urban fabric, the geography and the natural forces to overcome the dissociation in between grey and green, built and unbuilt. Perhaps herein lies the promise of a post-Covid society, an inclusive resilient society embracing singularities and solidarities through a new sensitivity to our immediate surroundings.
Mathieu Lucas
