Compromises
Travelling Seminar | Paris
October 20 – 26
EKA Interior Architecture BA 3
Tutor: Paula Veidenbauma
From 20 to 26 October, the third-year Interior Architecture BA students of EKA travelled to Paris for a travelling seminar titled Compromises, tutored by Paula Veidenbauma. The course examined the intersections of two major urban projects: the Grands Ensembles, France’s post-war mass housing estates, and the Grand Paris Express, the new metro network devised to reconnect these peripheral districts to the city. By tracing points of contact through infrastructures, construction sites and architectures of compromise, the seminar explored how modernist utopias translate into contemporary realities of mobility, temporality and real estate. The trip culminated at one of the latest ‘grand projects’, the 2024 Olympic Village, which is currently undergoing its transformation into a housing development.
The seminar began with mappings of junction points such as the interfaces with the périphérique, construction sites and the projected image of faster transit. A series of self-organised tours expanded on how modernist housing ideals meet the contemporary ethos of multi-modal urban life and the logics of real-estate development. Through student-led excursions to selected Grands Ensembles along the still-imagined Grand Paris Express corridor, the group arrived at the 2024 Olympic Village and observed the processes unfolding in the aftermath of a large-scale event. The course investigated both the materially programmed and improvised logics of habitation, and considered how the ambitions of post-war housing coexist or clash with strategies of adaptation and mobility acceleration.
Attention to housing was approached from the scale of the individual unit and its programme by tracing floor plans, balconies, sunlight and mobility interfaces, alongside noting encounters with Paris intra-muros and its mobility devices. Throughout the week students were tasked with identifying and documenting architectures of compromise and expanding their emerging typologies. Acting as a mobile editorial body, the group produced an ephemeral catalogue of architectural compromises through close observation. The trip concluded with the opening of a collective index, compiled from the observed moments of compromise. This raised questions about what emerges between permanence and temporariness, and what typologies arise when shaped by sacrifice, delay or waiting.
Students also met Paris-based practitioners working across the expanded field of architecture. At the Cité Internationale des Arts, the group met Ella Kaira and Matti Jänkälä, curators of this year’s Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, who work together under their shared practice, Vokal. Currently based in Paris, they are developing a project at the Cité titled Grand [Ensemble] Tour, a re-reading of the traditional grand tour through hand-drawn studies of life in the Grands Ensembles. Their methodology involves connecting with local organisations and residents. After an introductory lecture, the group travelled with them to Sarcelles in the northern suburbs for an observational drawing exercise while learning about the architecture of its housing estates.
John Bingham-Hall, researcher, writer and cultural organiser at Theatrum Mundi, introduced his newly edited book Staging Ground: Infrastructure, Performance, and Bodies in Movement (dpr Barcelona, 2025). His lecture outlined the contextual complexity of Paris’s infrastructural politics and contemporary urban strategies, drawing attention to how landscape design often treats greenery as a material tactic that produces fragmented pockets of urban nature serving human needs or contributing to green gentrification and branding. After the lecture, the group visited a newly inaugurated “urban forest” near Hôtel de Ville, enigmatic of recent Parisian landscape strategy, and discussed the technopolitics of highly managed urban nature. The following day, students met Lucille Leger, an artist working at atelier DOC! in Paris. She introduced her recent exhibition together with Jacques-Marie Ligot, Réverbère, which explores energy histories through spectral beings, and spoke about her approach to experimental model-building, intersections between art and architecture, ongoing ghost research and experiences of short-term artist-run communal housing in Paris.
The final two days of the trip were dedicated to excursions to Noisy-le-Grand, the Espaces d’Abraxas and the Arènes de Picasso, then moving westward to Les Damiers and finally to the Olympic Village in Saint-Denis. On the last evening, after the presentation of the compromise indexes, Beāte Zavadska, an architect at Czvek Rigby in Brussels, shared a set of compromise vignettes from her architectural practice framed through Aristide Antonas’s concept of “protocols”. The lecture took place at Gare de l’Est and concluded with a vernissage of the Compromise zines.
The course was made possible with the support of the Estonian Cultural Endowment and Erasmus+.