MicromegasLab was created in 2011 when the La Cambre and Horta institutes of architecture merged. When it became part of the ULB, the workshop joined the Erasmus Mundus exchange network. We then decided to focus our teaching and research on the metropolitan phenomenon. Why are cities created? How do they evolve? Is it possible to understand their highly complex development and make them more environmentally friendly? Even though our cultures and habits sometimes seem diametrically opposed, our cities share a relatively similar way of evolving, adapting, interacting, and connecting.
The studio became a platform for international exchange with a series of studies on the cities of Casablanca, Sarajevo, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Detroit, and Miami. Although the result of these trips took the form of architectural projects, the studio also became a laboratory for developing a unique method and teaching approach. The analysis, diagnosis, and synthesis of urban phenomena stimulate the desire, imagination, and creativity necessary for the production of architectural projects. In 2020, the pandemic marked the end of these international exchanges. The world voluntarily curtailed all forms of mobility for a long time. We adapted the workshop to focus on the study of Flemish cities—Aalst, Ghent, Antwerp, Mechelen, and Leuven—an eldorado of architecture and urban planning located just across a linguistic border. After this period of reflection, we are redirecting our focus towards European cities, starting with France. After Dunkirk and before Marseille (2025-2026), we studied Bordeaux, illustrated by the selection of student projects included in the following article.
What is Bordeaux's identity? During our research with students, this question of identity was a recurring theme. Contemporary cities must, in principle, stand out, highlighting a form of uniqueness that is clear and often caricatural, with the aim of appealing at first glance and seducing instantly. This identity is often based on the rather artificial creation of an image that quickly turns out to be a mirage. In architecture, this translates into the construction of an easily recognizable “object” building. Explaining the complexity of this phenomenon would take more time, but it is important to note that it generally stems from economic ambitions. Paradoxically, creating an identity at any cost often proves to be a trap. In order to make themselves admirable and attract the spotlight and financial flows, cities mislead themselves with an image that tends to unravel the real specificities of their places. They standardize, flatten, and mask the complexity, diversity, and heterogeneity that make up the richness of our anthills.
Bordeaux is obviously no exception to this desire to create its own identity in order to attract the attention necessary for its development, renewal, and maintenance. Our workshop is therefore based on a strategy of skimming the surface of the commonplaces on which this identity is based, in order to move away from them and seek out specific features in lesser-known places. This is not a desire for originality, but rather an interest in discovering, with the students, the real singularities of a city. To delve into reality in places that are less tidy, more complex, mixed and often heterogeneous. In Bordeaux, for example, large cruise ships illustrate the city's need for easy consumption. While for some, it comes down to its Cité du Vin, its vineyards, and its canelés, the metropolis also consists of stone quarries that have reached the end of their life, abandoned churches transformed into parking lots, the undersides of engineering structures with ambiguous public spaces, outdated suburban supermarkets that have become the last places for socialization, burnt-out châteaux1 with vineyards torn from the hillsides, recycling parks wedged between two bridges, converted industrial warehouses, empty parking garages in the center of university campuses, and social housing—all of which are heterogeneous spaces rich in meaning.
The search for identity is profoundly transforming working-class neighborhoods, whose urban fabric is often too fragile to accommodate large objects alongside other large egos. The smooth facades of ground floors, which are often too impervious, destroy the very notion of public space. It is clear that cities are constantly striving to maintain an economic system that allows everyone to exchange knowledge, materials, and ideas. However, must we not be careful that this search does not transform the city into a generic place, emptied of its meaning and authenticity?
After exploring the question of identity, it is important to explain the pedagogical method behind our approach. It has gradually evolved towards a desire to put hand drawing back at the center of research tools. Perhaps this is based on a new need to distance ourselves from computers, which are sometimes too present in our teaching? In line with the desire to bring complexity back to the forefront, the workshop aims, through drawing, to move away from digital standardization and reintroduce the richness of ornamentation and the vibrancy of each student. In addition, our trips are an integral part of our teaching. They help to bring out the specificities of a city, its complexity, its tensions or its scars, to learn to understand it, to tame it, even in its urban underbelly, and to find ways to make it evolve through architectural projects. Two trips punctuated the year for the 60 students enrolled. The first, at the end of October 2024, allowed them to discover Bordeaux and meet a series of experts and actors in the field, in order to arouse curiosity about the different themes and singularities of the city. Each participant must produce one hand-drawn sketch per day in A5 format. There are no guidelines for this exercise. Next, large drawings in A1 format, depicting maps on a territorial scale, attempt to highlight specific urban features. Other large drawings explore and illustrate technical details from contemporary or historical projects. This approach to territory plunges us into the heart of reality, into the very substance of things. How can we define an architectural detail? And how can this detail, in turn, define architecture? What is its contribution to the aesthetics, functionality, and sustainability of a building? These different families of research, on different scales and formats, will gradually serve as guides for long urban walks off the beaten track.
The second trip, organized at the end of February 2025, consisted of a more detailed survey of the city with an unusual route connecting each site selected by the students. These visits provided a unique way of seeing and understanding the city: neither residents nor tourists travel such long distances through residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, suburbs, tourist areas, and stone quarries. These two trips are study opportunities that are an integral part of the learning method. All the experiments will ultimately come together in situ in architectural projects that are implemented in places that resonate with the research. Like the large urban cross-sections that Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubió made in the territory to understand and care for it, the workshop uses the architectural project as urban acupuncture needles, whose story unfolds in invisible territories.
- Reference to the Grand Dragon estate in Bouliac. ↗