Intramuros has joined forces with the Camondo school for an unprecedented collaboration: giving the opportunity to students selected by Sunbrella, Lafuma and Moore Design to work on projects that will be published.
Founded seventy-five years ago, the Camondo school trains interior architects-designers after five years of training. in Paris, a true entity of the Decorative Arts, it enjoys a unique situation in Europe by being backed by a French cultural institution, whose collections and resources promote the decorative arts, contemporary design, the high-quality know-how of artisans and industrialists, and it participates in their influence and transmission. At the start of the September 2019 school year, the Camondo school moved to a second site in Toulon, in the Chalucet sector, a new “knowledge district”, facing the Mediterranean.
A pedagogy
The Camondo school’s diplomas cover three main areas of study: scenography (performing arts, museography, events); space for tomorrow (prospective vision of uses, services in public spaces, new technologies, etc.); new contractors (private space, hospitality, heritage, rehabilitation, crafts) …
The school’s ambition is to equip the students it trains so that they deploy their creative and visionary singularity. The school, its team, its teachers, have set themselves the collective ambition of embracing a more forward-looking and societal identity of the profession, crossed by the question of the user, of the scenarios of use and therefore of the central place of human, where the interaction between object and space makes it possible to design a fairer and smarter world and universes of life.
If they design a gourmet restaurant, within the framework of their imposed subject, it must achieve a zero carbon footprint.
If they design urban or rural living spaces, they imagine it around reuse, the question of what exists or that of sharing.
If they create new objects, they attach themselves to the recyclable nature of the materials through responsible craftsmanship.
The scale of their thought is anchored at the intersection of those of the designer and the architect. It relies on the interiority of spaces and beings to better emancipate itself towards the outside and others.
The end of studies, a key step
This year, the school will graduate sixty students. Embracing a subject supposes defining a territory, defining a question, finding a sponsor, inventing the program, inventorying the constraints, deploying a method, developing a project by mastering all its aspects, by reducing all the difficulties – whether it be furniture, objects, spaces, services, uses or all at the same time -, to project their materiality in these smallest details.
So many challenges and approaches, between those who seek and experiment, those who build in the built environment, those who stage the performing arts, those who invent the services of tomorrow. These subjects are often linked to the work of constructing a well-founded, documented, critical and self-aware discourse that each student had to carry out for the drafting of his thesis.
Patient work lasting an entire year, also resulting in the production of a written document, very often an object-memory, whose quality of layout rivals the relevance of the content. To underline the student’s investment – and enhance this approach which crowns five years of study, sharing, creation, for each and every student -, the school is one of the few to have designed a memorial platform for these diplomas in the form of a virtual exhibition for each promotion.
The challenge of promoting Cynthia Fleury
This year, the class, which took for name that of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Cynthia Fleury, very committed to the ethics of care alongside the Sismo (see article p. 28), is invited to a new post-graduation challenge. As part of the competition launched by Intramuros, the partners Sunbrella, Lafuma and Moore Design are invited, this first half of July, to consult the virtual exhibition of student projects. Each will then establish a list of around ten students with whom they will interact by videoconference, and they will decide at the end of July on the three selected students …
These laureates will thus have the exceptional opportunity to materialize the work undertaken for their diploma as part of an in-depth reflection with the partners: with regard to their projects, the latter will propose a brief on which they will base themselves and then move on to the implementation phase.
These winners will be discovered in the next issue of Intramuros, and their projects will be presented in the end-of-year issue.
