ARCHITECTURES ANNE DEMIANS

Ten years after creating her agency, Anne Démians ranks among the most respected architects of her generation among French developers and contracting authorities. Her handwriting / approach inspires city authorities because they see her as a highly committed professional whose economic pragmatism combined with the quality use of a building - and its possible reconversion - contribute to building the urban landscape of the twenty-first century. As she states, «Cities and urban areas are radiating outwards and opening the way to a different future, depending on whether or not they bring a more or less inhibiting history and a character with them. The urban impulsion depends on it. « Her credo is based on the need to anticipate urban developments before speculative amenities and urban sprawl contradict the territorial balance. This balance is being slowly but irremediably broken by the recent acceleration in critical situations. In the interest of seeing architecture used as a general logic for each building, she designs energy efficient buildings, capable of adapting to other uses over time, legible leitmotifs in her architectural portfolio, free of pre-established rules. She readily admits, «I turn the «ready to build « upside down by integrating local urban references, literary or stylistically, and I also avert the codes of expression dictated by established rules or strange reasoning.» Having a head start on twenty-first century urban planning and implementing an adaptable town is not an incantatory speech on her behalf, but rather a way of rethinking the density and diversity in broader terms and in a creative way as her current projects bear witness. Her commitment against (restrictive) certifications led her to participate in the work group created by the Ministry of Energy of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning, and to consider the applications and changes to be made to RT 2012. In February 2015, she was named winner of the open competition for the rehabilitation and expansion of the ESPCI, the École Supérieure de physique et de chimie Industrielles. ESPCI Paris Tech is a major institution of higher education (a French «Grande École d’ingénieurs»), an internationally renowned research center, and a fertile ground of innovation for industry in the university of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. This project confirms her ability to transform the «School of the Nobel Prize» for over a century into an international campus. A campus adapted to the new practices of team research, with its multiplicity of locations of conferences and the flexibility of its laboratories.