Nowadays, the contemporary city is built up with additions, fragments, parts of a all that gradually act on the whole place and little by little transform it. The setting up of infrastructures, and the localization of the strategical functions resulting from them, have a leading role in this metamorphosis. The Grand Paris produces these actions at two different and complementary scales: territorial and urban.
Thus, the Grand Paris stations are personifying the new forms of a refounded urbanity that is based on the re-organization of the mobilities, the diversity of uses and programs, the reconquest of a green, welcoming and comfortable public space, the creation of an emblematic architecture. The issue is to encourage architectural and urban measures that can set up and stage life in the city - between social rules and private dimension.
Our responsibility and our commitment consist in taking the opportunity given by the creation of the infrastructure to contribute to build a new urban landscape able to dialog with the existing but also to modify its perception.
The objective is to install the program in a whole complex that takes possession of the site in all its dimensions, combines the diversity of shapes and contents looking for a unit image, at the scale of the context and the neighbouring buildings.
Unity and part of a whole. Our ambition is the research of an equilibrium between the urban role of the whole (unity) and the identity of each part that composes it (the sequence of uses). This attitude is materialized by a line, parallel to the pavement, that deviates and opens on two courtyards giving access to the housing on one hand and on the offices and the residences (student housing and hotel) on the other hand. The project finds its shape in an alternating of sequences that appear on one façade or on the other, until it creates a system of urban stages that let the sunlight penetrate inside; as if the light had dug and sculpted the original volumetry to give form to a situation of emergence, territorial signal at 50 meters above the station.
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