About

Tronto and Fischer define the concept of care as an activity aimed at maintaining and restoring the world, including the body, individuals, and the environment.

The students were invited to apply this approach to the Renée-Sabran Hospital, whose exceptional setting invites a rethinking of care in a broader context.

The scope of the study extends beyond the initial commission to examine the relationship between the hospital and its landscape, which has been weakened over time by wear and tear and changing uses. The challenge is to demonstrate that designers can adopt a critical stance to help reframe the commission and open the door to richer solutions.

Reinventing this hospital means healing the place as much as the bodies, by reconnecting with the original spirit of the sanatorium, where nature played a full part in the healing process. The project explores a broader form of therapy that integrates relationships, landscape, materiality, and perception, and invites the design of spaces and objects capable of becoming therapeutic gestures.

Students work at the intersection of landscape and everyday systems, drawing on living materials and understated craftsmanship, to relearn how to inhabit a fragile world and envision a renewed sense of hospitality.

Heritage is not merely a static legacy, but a living process of selection, interpretation, and transmission, revealing what an era chooses to retain or forget. Heritage objects, whether humble or institutional, are active witnesses to our values, techniques, and imaginations.

Against a backdrop of ecological, technological, and ideological crises, heritage can no longer be limited to the preservation of the past: it is becoming a space for projection, debate, and transformation. The environmental crisis calls for a break with the throwaway mentality in order to promote sustainability, reparability, and local craftsmanship, while the digital age raises new questions. At the same time, heritage is being exploited in ideological struggles and the rewriting of narratives.

The challenge presented to designers is to create an object or a collection of objects with a strong heritage dimension, capable of making its references clear through its form, materials, uses, and symbolic language.

The Arte-Maeght Printing House, located on Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, serves as the focus of an architectural heritage restoration project. Nestled in a discreet inner courtyard yet connected to a vibrant neighborhood, it represents an iconic industrial complex blending traditional printing workshops with peripheral spaces. Its renovation involves preserving its artistic identity while incorporating new uses.

The project invites students to design an architectural solution that combines heritage preservation, functional diversity, cultural mediation, and programmatic innovation.

The goal is to enhance the existing structure, understand the site’s social, urban, and cultural challenges, and propose an intervention rooted in the site’s history.

The project must foster coexistence between workshops, housing, and public spaces by creating fluid circulation patterns and evocative atmospheres based on light, materials, and acoustics.