Fluid Stone,
Nantes

With these two proposals for Groupe LeGendre Headquarters, PROGRAM COLLECTIVE continues our group’s artistic and conceptual explorations in the adaptation of man-made technologies and innovations towards creating new forms of public experience and awareness. And in particular, seeking to cultivate awareness of humanity’s intrinsic, emotional and tactile connections to the organic, living natural environment.

Both projects engage the idea of “energy visualization” and as such are an extension of our most recent large-scale public art works, including 2008’s “We are Water” and “Splash.” The two approaches illustrate within this document define the public experience for the LeGendre lobby through thematic transformations of unseen or invisible aspects of the natural world into palpable realities.

Each is achieved using a mix of conventional technologies (from the builder’s craft to the sculptor) and new tools (from digital animation to mathematical parametric programming).

PROGRAM COLLECTIVE thought a public work for the headquarters of an innovative and responsible organization like LeGendre should reveal to the public in some way the ethical commitment our client has made to the principles of environmental awareness and sustainability.

It struck us that the work of sustainable construction – what we might call a kind of “aware building arts” is inherently about crafting harmonious exchange between the geometric, mathematical and engineered (the abstract) and the emotional, organic, and living environment. So we endeavored to determine a few modes of expression that might connect the public to this possibility.

ENERGY became the object of our investigation, and both proposals seek (at different budget levels) to visualize them and make them palpable and impactful to the visiting public.

Though we associate buildings, construction with their envelopes, the important point of contact they make with the living, organic world is invisible. Where one perceives just empty space is full of energy: flows of heat that can be seen only through technological means such as thermal imaging. And in the flow of heat energy, the difference between a building which is sustainable and one which is not, the difference between a construction that is in balance with the natural environment, and one which confronts it.