Projet d'architecture 5.19 : OOT - Out of Town

Today, urbanization processes extend far beyond the framework of urban and metropolitan agglomerations, profoundly transforming cultivated fields, tropical forests, deserts, oceans... The scale of these processes has only grown over the last fifty years. Cities have moved from a dependence on their immediate environment to relying on increasingly vast territories and networks, connected by intertwined and proliferating supply chains. This often asymmetrical dependence ultimately modifies Earth's ecologies.

OOT - Out Of Town is based on the premise that for architecture and urban planning to address these challenges, they require a precise and situated knowledge of the diverse situations that manifest outside our agglomerations, in the peripheries of cities, within environments often far from our view, but which directly sustain our lives. Can we still classify them as "rural," as subordinate places, haunted by a past that tends to boycott their progress? Can we still set them aside when they are being shaken by the contemporary dynamics of global interconnectivity and exploitation?

This academic year's theme for 2025–26 is extractivism and “rare earths,” a term we use as a metaphor to denote architecture’s entanglement in global ecological challenges. The term “rare earths” itself was born from an ambivalence: they are “earths,” meaning chemical oxides like those found on the Earth's crust, available everywhere. They are also “rare” due to the small quantity of metals they contain, which requires ridiculously large amounts of energy for their extraction. And they have become even rarer due to the enormous quantities of these metals that the ongoing energy transition requires, as well as the few places where they are found in sufficient concentration to make their exploitation possible.

How can “rare earths” help us reshape the current dominant narrative centered on high energy and consumption into a more modest narrative about how to live with the Earth, by reconciling these places of frantic exploitation and resistant action with the past and present practices of their inhabitants (in the traditional sense of local residents), both human and non-human, our potential allies, to adaptively rework ourselves and our discipline? This undertaking stems from the Erasmus+ cooperation partnership NeRu (newruralities.eu) that was conducted between 2022-2025 between 6 European universities: ULB, Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Universidade da Coruña (Spain), Universidade do Minho (Portugal), Universitet Po Architektura Stroitelstvo I Geodezija of Sofia (Bulgaria), as well as ETH Zürich (Switzerland).

Our place of exploration starts with an abandoned mine, the Salsigne mine (France), and an observation zone around it, the Massif de la Montagne Noire, which forms the southern end of the Massif Central and extends mainly over the Aude and Tarn regions in France. Until its closure in 2004, this mine was the most important gold mine in Europe. The history of mining in the Montagne Noire area goes back, according to some sources, to Antiquity. Since that period, and with intermittent moments of great exploitation, the benefit from the mineral deposits (of gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, arsenic...) that populated this territory is no longer maintained for the moment, but has been the subject of numerous discussions for several years around a possible reactivation, mainly for the presence of rare earths.

Indeed, mining is present in practically all human activities since, with the exception of wood and natural fibers, all the materials used for our development are of mineral origin. In the EU, we consume an annual average of between 5 and 10 tons of mineral products extracted from the subsoil per person. That said, the attention we pay to mining inevitably extends to the consideration of all other fundamentally extractive activities of natural resources (raw material stocks) that take place in this territory, such as wind turbines, wood, and water (for obtaining energy or food), etc. As well as to the demands of residents of rural areas and the resulting socio-environmental conflicts to prevent the same places from always having to “swallow the brown,” entering a spiral of environmental degradation that leads them to decline, without any possibility of recovery.

The mine is a starting point for reflection, not as a simple industrial infrastructure, but as a revealer of a broader system: that of contemporary extractivism. There is no predefined program. Through your research, you will be led to propose “fundamental questions” that will serve to guide your work and allow you to develop programmatic hypotheses, in resonance with the object of your concerns. These hypotheses will be shared collectively for validation in the studio.

OOT - Out Of Town participates in the improvement of the specific learning outcomes expected within the Architectural Project courses, as included in the evaluation grid for the Bachelor juries (see downloadable file below):

• Spatial dimensioning
• Architectural composition
• Uses
• Scales
• Materiality
• Oral and graphic presentation

In addition to these minimum achievements, the Master students are supposed to develop their work autonomously and be capable to outline the complexity of situations they will address in their spatial proposals. Moreover, their work should demonstrate a critical and creative approach to the design process, resulting into original outcomes, thus demonstrating their preparedness to integrate the professional environment after graduation. The MA1 students will be invited to focus its work on the theme of “extractive landscapes”.

Required and corequired courses

The OOT - Out Of Town design unit’s pedagogy is built around the spatial project as a dialogical and research device. Two weekly sessions are planned, alternately dedicated to structured communications by the teaching staff, contributions from external guests, site or exhibition visits, and short, very formatted exercises (e.g. reading seminar, “design sprints” for developing a well-defined project, etc.), group discussions, individual and/or group work sessions, “correction” or CRITS sessions of assignments, as well as participation in cultural events outside the time assigned to the course sessions (conferences, ...). Their purpose, modalities, and deadlines are communicated during the course, and they help to assess every student’s skills individually. The presentation of this work is the subject of constructive evaluations. All these activities ultimately culminate each semester into the production of a spatial project, made in groups or individually, dealing with the transformation of a given situation.

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

Here is a list of books and articles feeding into the OOT - Out Of Town’s teaching activities:

• Berger, John (1992) Pig Earth. 1st Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage international. [en biblothèque]
• Center for Sustainability Circular Industries Hub (2022), “White paper: Critical materials, green energy and geopolitics: a complex mix”, LINK
• Debaise, Didier, and Isabelle Stengers (2017) “The Insistence of the Possible: For a Speculative Pragmatism.” Multitudes (Paris, France) 65.4: 82–89. LINK
• Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste (2024) Sans transition : une nouvelle histoire de l’énergie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
• Fressoz, Jean Baptiste (2023) « L’énergie: une histoire symbiotique ». Histoire & mesure 38.1: 153‑155. LINK
• Ingold, Tim (2007) Lines: A Brief History. London; Routledge. [en bibliothèque]
• Izoard, Celia (2024) La Ruée minière au XXIe siècle. Enquête sur les métaux à l'ère de la transition. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
• Koolhaas, R.; Bantal, S. (2020) Countryside: A Report (exhibition catalogue: Guggenheim Museum). Taschen. [en bibliothèque]
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, ed. (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [en bibliothèque]
• Uyttenhoven, P., Vanbelleghem, D., Van Bouwel, I., Nottenboom, B., Debergh, R., Willequet, B. (2018) Recollecting Landscapes - Rephotography, Memory and Transformation 1904–1980-2004-2014. Roma Publications. [en bibliothèque] See also the website, http://www.recollectinglandscapes.be/en-general
• Woods, M. (2010) Rural. New York: Routledge. [en bibliothèque]
• European Environmental Bureau & Friends of the Earth (2021) “‘Green mining’ is a myth: the case for cutting EU resource consumption”, LINK

Course notes

• Syllabus

Additional information

Language of instruction:

The OOT - Out of Town unit has for several years promoted the use of English in the workshop, to enable students who do not have the opportunity to participate in an international mobility program, those who wish to prepare for one, or those who wish to improve their language skills. This year, having identified a research area in France, the design unit will be held in French. However, English may be used as a second language if needed, for example by external guest members.
No level of English is therefore required to participate in the OOT - Out of Town unit.

Contacts

Teaching team:

S1= 1st term: François Vliebergh & Sofie Devriendt
S2= 2nd term: François Vliebergh & Benoît Burquel

Contact(s)

Francois.Vliebergh@ulb.be ;  Sofie.Devriendt@ulb.be ; Benoit.Burquel@ulb.be

Campus

Outside campus ULB

Method(s) of evaluation

• Project

Project

Two methods of evaluation are planned:

1. Ongoing “formative” evaluations of the work provided by the students (consisting of in-between submissions, on agreed dates, of the progress of design research, both group and individual work) and their active and engaged participation during the studio sessions. These formative evaluations will be communicated throughout the year, at the end of the key moments, adding up at the end of the first term. The obtained grades will allow the students to “place” themselves in their formative trajectory throughout the year. The faculty reserves the right to overestimate or underestimate formative grades for pedagogical reasons, mainly to motivate students.
2. “Certifying” evaluations at the end of each term. The semester and year grade of the OOT - Out Of Town unit will result from the certifying grades’ arithmetic average obtained during the year, weighted when needed.

During some of these evaluation moments, the teaching staff forms a “jury”, composed of invited personalities with diverse profiles. The students will present their work to this jury, which will evaluate it. This jury is separate from the deliberation jury, which is composed solely of the faculty's teaching staff. Such a “jury” aims to confront the students with their peers and eventual commissioners, and to objectify the acquisition of knowledge relevant to the professional and societal contexts.

The work of the B.Arch-3 and M.Arch-2 students (diploma years) must also meet the evaluation criteria shared by all the faculty's design units.

Mark calculation method (including weighting of intermediary marks)

As a continuation of the previous section, “formative” evaluations do not contribute arithmetically to the construction of the grade but colour it.

The design unit grade is built exclusively on the “certifying” evaluations, which will measure the progress and the ability of the students to acquire the expected knowledge. The certifying evaluations are weighted as follows:

S1 certifying evaluation: 40% of the final grade

• Semester 1 (or Fall semester): 40% (mark awarded by the unit instructors in consideration of the cognitive AND behavioural skills demonstrated by each student). A “jury” will be organized at the end of the S1 and will constitute a “formative” evaluation that the instructors will consider in the calculation of the semester “certifying” grade.

S2 certifying evaluation: 60% of the final grade

• Semester 2 (or Spring semester): 30% (mark given by the unit instructors in consideration of the cognitive AND behavioural skills demonstrated by each student);
• SIP: 5%
• Final jury: 25% (mark awarded by the unit instructors and the members of the “jury” on the basis of the BA3 jury evaluation grid and the corresponding teaching profile)

M.Arch 2 students attending only S2 will be assigned the S2 grade as the final grade, weighted as follows:

• Semester 2 (or Spring semester): 57.5% of the final grade (mark awarded by the teachers in consideration of the cognitive AND behavioural skills demonstrated by the student);
• SIP: 2.5%
• Final jury: 40% of the final mark (mark awarded by the unit instructors and the members of the “jury” on the basis of the BA3 jury evaluation grid and the corresponding teaching profile)

The cognitive skills assessed are those included in the "Master of Architecture" teaching profile under the titles:

• A. To design an architectural project;
• B. To develop a reflective attitude enriching a situated spatial response;
• C. To build, as an architect, a civic commitment and an ethical and responsible practice;
• D. To interact with all the actors involved in questions of space and architecture.

Behavioural skills are – in addition to regularity, participation, progress, compliance with deadlines and instructions, care and a constructive and respectful attitude towards the collective – among those targeted by the "Master of Architecture" teaching profile:

• To identify, understand and deconstruct the commonplaces;
• To understand the social, political and ethical issues surrounding architectural projects;
• To make committed and autonomous choices;
• To open up to the world;
• To demonstrate listening, analytical and synthesis skills.

Language(s) of evaluation

• french
• partially in english