Advanced Design Studio, Bunge-Hoang

Paris Double

Version 08.04.09

Synopsis:

This architecture design studio will use the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris as a site for architectural invention and urban provocation. Students will design a cultural building and public space at the Porte de Montreuil that offers new connections between Paris and its suburbs. With the aim of reinventing relationships between center and periphery, and using a technique we will refer to as “doubling”, students will reformulate institutional, organizational and formal attributes of existing canonical buildings and institutions in the center of Paris. The studio will visit Paris and conduct a programming workshop in conjunction with local inhabitants and officials from the Mairie de Paris (City Hall).

The Boulevard Périphérique

When traveling at the legal speed limit of 80km/h, it takes 26 minutes and 17 seconds to complete a full circuit of Europe’s most famous ring road - the 35km Boulevard Périphérique in Paris. Usually, however, it takes much longer. Built in the 1970s upon former military defenses demolished in the 1920s, and roughly aligned with the city’s administrative limits, the “Periph” is now one of Europe’s most congested highways, and a significant barrier between Paris and its suburbs. In this context, the Périphérique has come under renewed scrutiny, as plans initiated by the City of Paris in 2002 and by France’s Federal government in 2008 are challenging the city’s urban limits and identity.

Before Nicolas Sarkozy’s well publicized Grand Paris – a pharaonic initiative to extend the city’s metropolitan domain and connect its 2 million inhabitants to 6 million living in its adjacent suburbs – the City of Paris had launched the Grand Projet de Renouvellement Urbain (G.P.R.U.: Grand Project for Urban Revitalization) in 2002. Aimed more concretely at redefining the immediate edge of Paris, the objectives of the GPRU are to improve local living conditions and public space, diversify zoning, and create better connections between Paris and its adjacent Communes. Eleven sites along the Périphérique were chosen for development, including the Porte de Montreuil – our area of focus. This important former gateway to Paris is now a large traffic roundabout dividing the City of Paris from the neighboring suburb of Montreuil.

The areas surrounding Porte de Montreuil are characterized by social and economic difficulties, a fragmented urbanism that includes modernist towers/plinth, and the strong presence of the Boulevards Périphérique and Maréchaux, which divide adjacent communities. However, the area also presents important opportunities for social and cultural programming: a high density (27,000 people/km2), new initiatives from local agents, and the large open space of the Ceinture Verte “Green Belt” along the highway to appropriate.

The GPRU plans to initiate workshops and pilot projects in the Fall of 2009, culminating in a series of transitional interventions that will act as a laboratory for and prelude to an ambitious reinvention of the areas in question. One aim of the studio will be to contribute to this discussion.

The Double: From Center to Periphery

This architecture studio will specifically focus on the imminent transformation of Porte de Montreuil. Students will design a new cultural building and public space that bridges over the highway and that reconfigures relationships between the two sides. While the physical site for our investigation will be located above the sunken Boulevard Périphérique, the conceptual and territorial aspirations for the studio will embrace larger issues of center and periphery that the city’s urban revitalization projects are certain to address.

At the beginning of the semester, each student will select from a list a single cultural institution housed in a canonical work of architecture at the center of Paris. This repertoire of buildings and their subsequent analysis will serve as a springboard for imaginative reformulations of normative relationships, including those between building/public space, institution/neighborhood, and architecture/infrastructure. We will refer to this technique as “doubling”, and here need to recall that the “double” was a teaching and design method used by the late Enric Miralles. Neither copy nor mere precedent, the “double” will transform yet to some degree maintain (invert, inflect, reposition, etc) conditions of the original. These might include conceptual, programmatic, organizational, formal, structural, or experiential attributes that, when reinterpreted through the lens of each students’ architectural and social agenda, would lead to both a unique outcome and a connection with the original. In this way, students will devise architectural strategies that reconnect currently divided areas of Paris in ways that exceed normative urban planning strategies that focus solely on issues of programming, transportation and urban form.

Paris Double therefore seeks to update the city’s canonical institutions by expanding their physical and conceptual territories. The conceptual site for each project will therefore be the larger urban context and the original canonical building. Students will establish whether their double serves as a complement, satellite, or node in a network of similar buildings. We will aim for technologically and spatially inventive architecture that also resonates with a larger urban and social context. While not an integrated design studio, students will benefit from the strategic collaboration of structural and environmental consultants in the format of engineering workshops during the semester.

Trip to Paris: Research and Workshop

A trip to Paris from September 19th to 24th, accompanied by the Critics. During our trip, the studio will visit relevant works of architecture, with a specific focus on the buildings selected for study. Students will design a collaborative workshop to be held with local inhabitants and officials from the Mairie de Paris, the object of which will be to develop programming and local site strategies, as well as to elaborate prototypical agendas for the transformation of the Boulevard Périphérique at large. With the assumption that the selection of buildings/institutions at the center of Paris will be known to participants in the workshop, these will also serve as a reference for debate.