In Paris Travel Studio, Site Inspires Performance

On Friday, December 6, a group of Weitzman students—multidisciplinary in their studies and multinational in their origins, but oriented towards the built environment and with eyes trained on historical and future environmental upheavals—will perform what their professor, Annette Fierro, calls “an ode to a site.” The site, a meander of the Seine just outside Paris, is a nexus of issues around land use and pollution. And the ode, polyphonic in authorship as it involves three different schools and 15 students around the world, strays far from the typical architecture studio production to incorporate technologies of storytelling, acting, sound design, and mapping.

Fierro, an associate professor of architecture who is also the architecture thesis director, has been thinking about the relationship between theatricality and architecture, explored in a pair of books: The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle/Paris 1981-1998 (MIT Press, 2003) and The Architectures of the Technopolis: Archigram and the British High Tech, (Lund Humphries Press, 2024). “I’m thinking about buildings not simply as objects but buildings for the kind of actions and many events that they spawn,” she says.

While living and working in Paris in 2023, Fierro began talking with Matthias Armengaud, an architect and visiting professor at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Versailles. They began thinking about the bend in the Seine, rich with history and imperiled by pollution and climate change, and decided to task their students with researching the site. “They have found all kinds of super interesting things,” she says, “including the extinction of wolves by hunters, the beginning of Haute Couture from Versailles to Paris, the notion that the fashion industry is producing mountains of textile waste, and the questions of habitats and wildlife. And, of course, the question of the Seine itself, the wild transformation of dry seasons and floods.”

Fierro and Armengaud challenged the students to not just present this research, but perform it. They began developing narratives, and then went to France, where architecture and landscape architecture students from the Weitzman School joined compatriots from the L’École nationale supérieure d’architecture Versailles and L’École nationale supérieure de paysage Versailles. Their time was divided between the outdoor landscapes and indoor classrooms.

“Usually in an architectural studio,” says Weitzman Master of Architecture student Carlotta de Bellis, “you have a site and a prompt and a project—develop a building, so to say.” This was different. “We’ve done an architectural proposal for the site, but it’s connected to the stories we’ve developed throughout the whole semester. We’re thinking about how people would live on the site in alternative communities. We’re thinking about broader issues, especially related to climate change.”

The students worked together for two days, and then mounted a performance that incorporated sets, projections, plots, and actors. “We were, at the beginning, a little more rigid,” than the French students, de Bellis laughs. “Their training and approach to the studio is different, so it was a very inspiring moment to see what they did.”

To help her Weitzman students tighten up their scripts and build their performance chops, Fierro brought in dramaturge Sebastienne Mundheim, who earned her BA and BFA at Penn in 1990 before embarking on a career integrated visual installations, puppetry, dance, and theatre.

“We met over the summer,” Mundheim says, “and she talked about the project. It felt so exciting to me to think about architecture as something ephemeral, which is very appealing to me as a performance maker. We’re all ephemeral, and we aspire to something more permanent, in moments. But for somebody in architecture to acknowledge that it can be ephemeral felt radical and appealing and important.”

De Bellis found Mundheim’s guidance liberating. “Architecture sometimes is all about redundancy,” she says, “making sure your client or studio really understands that you did the project well. But Sebastienne always says the theater audience is very intelligent. So you don’t necessarily have to show what you’re hearing through an actual sound, or you don’t have to show what your actor is saying—they can put together all the pieces themselves.”

Those pieces will range from depicting the exploits of an anthropomorphic Seine in the form a beast, to an invented future history of some 50 people building transitional housing on the riverbanks.

“We’re working with architect and faculty member Eduardo Rega Calvo, who deals with political issues and immigration in showing how to map a site,” Fierro says.

Perry Kulper, an architect and professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, offered the students stage set ideas. “He gave them a sort of workshop about how to think about making space which was essentially theatrical out of architectural components,” Fierro explains.

Weitzman’s own Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Robert Gerard Pietrusko also pitched in. “He’s a sonic cartographer who makes maps and then choreographs different soundscapes by registering sounds with locations, remixing them, then making maps with notations of sound,” she says. These practices will inform the sonic landscapes of the student’s stage-setting, world-building, and performance.

“Architecture has to do what performance does, too,” Mundheim says, “which is, lead you through a time-based experience.” This experience will form the finale of Fierro’s Collaborative Experimental 7010 Design Studio, which has been supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and by a donation from Dr. Robert M. Hauser.

“When you think about a studio,” Fierro says, “what is the outcome of it? A hypothetical building, landscape, an infrastructure drawn in 2D and modeled in 3D–a representation of something that would likely never happen, at least as they conceive it.” That’s not the story here. On the night of December 6, the Seine and the students’ ideas around it will, briefly but bodily, come to life. “Instead of anticipating something which is going to happen at some point in their careers, where they actually build something,” she says, “it is really going to happen.”