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Saint EtienneFrance ENSASE Niall Y Carroll [email protected] Saint Étienne is located 60k to the south east of Lyon. It does get some snow in winter but this generally clears away by the end of January. The summers however are warm and sunny with average mid 20 degree temperatures. Lyon is only a half hour train ride away and it’s a great place to go for a day trip and from there you can get to anywhere in France. There is plenty of holiday throughout the semester to travel. The city has roughly 20 thousand students across a dozen or so schools including a school of fine art and school of engineering. These schools take in a lot of Erasmus and exchange programme students, many from southern Europe, latin and northern America. The school of architecture itself is quite similar to Richview in terms of population and facilities. There are studio spaces but people usually work from home and use the studios to meet in groups with the tutors. There is a building lab, and a print shop run by the students and stuff is reasonably priced. The students society also run events such as one called Musitecture with musical events in the school and across the city for a week as well as bbqs and an end of year ball. As far as cost of living goes it’s the cheapest city in all of France, rent prices are at least half that of Dublin and the French government will even pay some of your rent! Our studio project was based in the Ar- deche Region of France. We visited the area initially over a weekend and at- tempted to orientate ourselves in the land- scape through exploring the walking routes throught the valleys and forests and later analysing throught map making. We visited the specific site for the project again at a later date. The aim of the study was to control how a small village in one of the Ardeche valleys would cope with future growth while trying to reestablish its roots and identity in the local agriculture. We had several talks with the mayor of the commune and other locals as part of our analysis. At the end of the semester we took a study trip to Switzerland for a week visit- ing projects by Zumthor, Olgiati, Snozzi and others. Being France there are loads of places to eat and you can eat really well on relatively little. There’s a great selection of cinemas including ones with original version films. Nightlife can sometimes be hard to find if you don’t know where to look. Pretty much all the bars are tucked away on one street. There are two decent museums in the city one of contemporary art which is rated as one of the best in France.
