The Boulevard Périphérique (ring road) has long been a neglected zone, rarely developed to its potential. The aim of the project, on the site of the Poterne des Peupliers is to reconcile the various scales of the city and to prime the transition from the city proper to the territorial city. The interest of society as a whole is the main driver of the project and thus generates an atypical cohabitation of uses: an area for activities related to logistics, designed as a platform for transporters and a funeral parlour.
The context suggests a two-part urban composition: a building serving as an urban sign, housing the platform dedicated to urban logistics, and visible from the Parisian beltway but also, on the city side, a volume with poetic and symbolic elements and functions, housing the funeral parlour, and thereby creating the transition to the urban scale of proximity. The central garden ensures these very different uses can live side by side.
These two scales, and two programs share a single and unifying sub-structure with two resonating superstructures emerging from this base:
the funeral parlour: a broad ramp, extending from the base all the way up to the floating volume and crossing over the garden, serves all the spaces designed for contemplation. Massive, in stone and creating a sufficient distance from the street, it is draped in a protective metallic netting.
the urban logistics platform: the raw concrete slabs arranged in a star plan function as a set of indented and ribbed platforms within a radial structure. At either end of the plan little spaces for offices have been designed with bronze-coloured façades. Creeping vines grow in the indented areas of the plan, creating propitious nooks for sustaining biodiversity. New tool for the re-claiming this complex territory, the mixed-use programme attempts to provide an adequate answer to the mutation of the zone surrounding Paris proper.
View Original