Just ten years after having created her agency, Anne Démians is now recognised as one of the architects of her generation most appreciated by French developers and clients. Her style has inspired urban stakeholders who see in her a committed professional for whom economic pragmatism allied to the functional qualities of a building – and its potential restructuring – participates in the construction of the 21st century city landscape. According to her, “the way that the city spreads and opens onto the future depends to what degree this movement is accompanied by a more or less inhibiting history or a character. It is this aspect that makes the urban impetus a reality”.
Her underlying credo is based on the need to anticipate urban land use before dull and essentially speculative developments further upset a territorial balance that the recent acceleration of critical situations is slowly but inevitably contributing to worsen. Armed with this belief, she prefers to look, observe and extend the city rather than “produce” buildings that come from nowhere and which do not contribute to their environment. She also treats the principle of spatial transformation as a priority in today’s architecture.
Motivated by a concern to see architecture serve an overall logic specific to each building, she designs economic structures that can be adapted to other uses over time, visible leitmotifs in her architectural scores freed from pre-established codes. She herself admits: “I upset “ready to build” solutions by combining urban, literary and stylistic references. I distance myself from standard codes of expression and the inflexible rigidity dictated by rules or twisted forms of logic”.
For Anne Démians, staying one step ahead of the 21st century city and providing the means to “better live together” goes much further than just being a subject of incantatory discourse. It is a way of rethinking density and population mix in a much wider manner through the use of a creative grid, as can be seen in her next three buildings:
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residential hotel (Icade)
Nancy: offices, shops, student residence (Cimad)
Fontenay sous Bois: head offices for the Société Générale bank (Sogeprom)
Strasbourg: property complex comprising three towers containing housing, offices and a
Her commitment to going beyond standards and certifications has led her to participate in the work group formed by the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Land Use, and to reflect on the applications and changes to be made to the RT2012 standard.