Dwelling in the year 2000: housing, the city and nature
European urban architecture future planning project
Among the cultural events organised to celebrate the new Millennium, EUROPAN Development, an international programme to promote new architecture, has launched, together with the partner cities – and the help of the Architecture and Heritage Department of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the 2000 Celebration Organising Committee- a major future planning project on urban architecture focusing on the topic of "DWELLING IN THE YEAR 2000: HOUSING, THE CITY AND NATURE". The aim of the future planning project is to produce innovative urban architecture projects and provide contemporary ideas on the use of space for cities in search of ways to renovate their residential areas for city-dwellers in the 3rd millennium.
Information to Françoise Bonnat: Europan@club-internet.fr
OBJECT :
Promoting a new housing culture in European cities:
The project has taken the form of a two-tiered urban architecture competition in which fifteen teams of young architects from all over Europe have been invited to take part (two teams from the Netherlands, two from Italy, one from Switzerland, one from Austria, one from Spain, one from Belgium and seven from France), all of whom are already prize-winners and who were spotted at previous competitions.
The project designs for residential neighbourhoods suited to life styles in the year 2000 had to be adaptable to various urban contexts related to the topic. Three urban locations were selected out of numerous possibilities to serve as a dynamic context for the competitors, allowing them to design innovative housing complexes for sites in which nature would be present, without specifying in advance the urban shape or types of dwellings to be chosen at the outcome of the competition.
The cities selected are representative of the principal types of urban redevelopment situations and of increasing residential density. Quarrata, a sprawling city in the greater Florence area in Italy, characterised by both rural and urban elements. In France: Grenoble, with a suburb close to the centre looking for ways to bring back the population that moved out to live in suburban greenery; and at the gates of Paris, Orly, a suburban area that is attempting to reconcile large housing complexes, metropolitan networks (airport, railways) and natural areas along the Seine River. All three cities are seeking new projects for their residential districts and are ready to attempt innovative experiments capable of combining the selected topics.
The cities are proposing to modify wastelands of between three and ten hectares currently undergoing change in existing neighbourhoods, located within a broader context of urban transformation. The zoning laws are flexible enough to permit innovative thinking and come up with powerful urban landscaping and architectural proposals. The number of housing units to be designed has not been predetermined, but planning density will ultimately have to reach between 0.75 and 1.5. The sites contain natural elements including water (rivers) and/or plant life (trees, gardens, forests, etc.), which can be blended with an already-existing or yet-to-be-constructed built-up area to form a new residential landscape.
PROCESS :
An original process to encourage the design and realisation of new ideas:
The project was introduced in early 2000 by seminars on each of the selected urban contexts for joint thinking by experts, competitors and city authorities. It has brought together on each site five teams of young European architects (who may be joined by other members for their specific skills).
Ideas were developed starting in July 2000 at the Palais de Chaillot (IFA, Cité de l'Architecture) where a workshop was held to enable all the teams to get a clear view of the issues involved as well as at meetings with city authorities and experts on the jury.
Project proposals were submitted at the beginning of September 2000.
An international jury (eleven members including an Italian urban planner, a Japanese landscape architect, a European critic, five well-known architects, a philosopher, a sociologist and a representative of the Ministry of Culture) will listen to the city authorities and candidates and select the most relevant ideas for each site at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux in November 2000. Taken together, the architecture projects form a series of events – an exhibition in Bordeaux opening on November 24 alongside the international exhibition "Mutations", a Europe-wide travelling exhibition - all of them forums for presenting and discussing the ideas in the cities and opportunities to contribute to an emerging new culture revolving around the topic of "Housing, the City and Nature".
The dynamic cultural comparisons will continue, as the award-winning ideas are turned into urban projects and/or concrete architectural realisations contracted by each city with the winning teams.
THE TOPIC: HOUSING, THE CITY AND NATURE
In most European countries, particularly in France, housing policies since World War Two have fluctuated between two extremes. On the one hand, large housing complexes were built, which came to signify council housing, poorly appropriated collective space and anonymity. In reaction to these complexes, suburban houses were scattered over outlying areas on the assumption that they would satisfy the individualism of their inhabitants. Yet each of the resulting spatial models was essentially restricted by its rejection of the values of the other. The first model concentrated underprivileged populations in gradually impoverished enclaves, while the second dispersed inhabitants in peripheral areas, far removed from city services.
For European cities, the challenge concerning new residential areas will be precisely to avoid the cleavage between collective and individual housing, between built-up and natural areas, between the centre and the periphery, between proximity and distance, between housing and the urban context. The future planning project "Dwelling in the Year 2000" offers an opportunity to think about ways of designing residential neighbourhoods to avoid the previous Manichean models and instead, meet the complex, sometimes even contradictory, demands and desires of European city dwellers for:
- urban housing, which means that the location and brief have to provide for housing, social and cultural services and collective meeting places within close range of each other
- compact built-up areas (an average of 100 housing units per hectare), allowing land to be used sparingly to offset the unlimited sprawl of today's cities and recover areas with now obsolete functions, while at the same time maintaining rapid access to the main hubs of the city centre
- an urban landscape resulting from relative building density that enhances natural areas and public spaces either inserted into or growing out of constructed space
- individualised housing that can be appropriated by inhabitants with varying lifestyles and tastes, as opposed to the functionalist model based on uniform housing
- modernised homes putting new technologies at the service of everyday living to foster new relationships between housing and the workplace
- an architectural renewal bringing together values symbolic of both dwelling and contemporary aesthetics, which take into account the quality of the atmosphere and environment.
15 PROJETS
GRENOBLE
LA VILLE FORET (LAUREAT)
[S333, Studio d'architecture et d'urbanisme] - Amsterdam, Nederland
Burton Hamfelt, Canadian architect
Chris Moller, New Zeeland architect
Dominic Papa, English architect
Jonathan Woodroffe, English architect
Tom van Arman, American architect
Lucas Chirnside, New Zeeland architect assistant
Rasmus Hansen, Danish architect assistant
NATURE CONTRE NATURE (MENTIONNE)
[TOA architectes] - Montreuil sous Bois, Schiltigheim, France
Thierry Maire, French architect
Olivier Méheux, French architect
Alain Oesh, French architect
DOMESTIC EXTERIOR (SPECIAL MENTION)
[privileggio-secchi] - Milan, Italy
Nicolo Privileggio, Italian architect
Marialessandra Secchi, Italian architect
LA VIE DU RAIL
Tania Concko, French architect-urban planer - Amsterdam, Nederland
Laurent Niget, French architect
Jean-Philippe Godin, French architect
HILLCITY
[Koerszeinstravangelderen architects] - Amsterdam, Nederland
Ira Koers, Dutch architect
Jurjen Zeinstra, Dutch architect
Mikel van Gelderen, Dutch architect
ORLY
LE DELTA URBAIN ET LE HUB D'HABITATIONS (WINNER)
Marjolijn Boudry, Belgian architect - Paris, France
Pierre Boudry, Belgian architect
RESOURCE (RUNNER-UP)
Dietger Wissounig, Austrian architect - Graz, Austria
SOL (RUNNER-UP)
Marc Bigarnet, French architect - Paris, France
Frédéric Bonnet, French architect
TETRIS VILLE / LA MATRICE
Fabienne Couvert, French architect - Paris, France
Guillaume Terver, French interior architect
BIO – CITY, NEW TERRITORIES FOR NATURE
Felipe Pich-Aguillera, Spanish architect - Barcelone, Spain
Bruno Sauer, Austrian architecte
QUARRATA
SYLVA'NA (RUNNER-UP)
[BNR Studio] - Paris, France
Thibaud Babled, French architect
Armand Nouvet, French architect
Marc Reynaud, French architect
LABORATOIRES RESIDENTIELS (SPECIAL MENTION)
Lorenzo Greppi, Italian architect - Firenze, Italy
Ernesto Bartolini, Italian architect
VILLE MAGNETIQUE, DE LA DENSITE A L'INTENSITE (SPECIAL MENTION)
[CompoSITE architects] - Paris, France
Véronique Descharrières, French architect
Cristina Devizzi, Italian architect
Solange Duchardt, French architect
Sabine Guth, French architect
Corinne Tiry, French architect
POUSSEZ LES MEUBLES
Gilles Ferreux, French architect - Lons Le Saunier, France
Gilles Reichardt, French architect
TERRES CRUES, TERRES CUITES
Alexandre Grutter, Franco-Swiss architect - Lausanne, Switzerland
Hélène Mehats-Grutter, French architect-urban planner
PARTNERS ET ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
The “Dwelling in the year 2000” competition is one of the architectural events on the programme of cultural events co-ordinated by the Year 2000 Celebration Organising Committee.
The competition was set up with the support of:
— the city of Quarrata ;
— the city of Grenoble ;
— the city of d’Orly ;
—the Ile-de-France Regional Council ;
— the Architecture and Heritage Department of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.
Acknowledgements:
— François Barré, former director of the Architecture and Heritage Department ;
— the mayors of Quarrata, Grenoble and Orly ;
— the fifteen teams of architects selected ;
— Jean-Louis Cohen, director of the IFA and head of the prefiguring committee for the Cité de l’architecture ;
— Renata Cortinovis, general secretary of the Musée de l’architecture ;
— Francine Fort, director of the Arc-en-rêve Architecture Centre in Bordeaux.
PUBLISHING
Dwelling in the year 2000, Grenoble (the outskirt), Orly (the suburb), Quarrata (the dispersed city), conducted by Didier Rebois, bilingual French/English catalogue, 232 pages four-colour, published in 3000 copies.
By publishing and disseminating this catalogue, we hope to make a further contribution to the thinking already under way in the cities aimed at finding a way to live in European cities in the third millennium that can reconcile urban modernisation, the art of city living and a longing for nature. It serves as a forum for the views of jury members, explains the thematic challenges of each site (sprawling city, city outskirts, suburb) and presents the 15 competing urban architecture proposals in no particular order as sensitive representations of the city of the future.
A Cederom goes with this catalogue. It presents the topic, the sites with a reportage of 40 photos realised by professionals, the 15 competing urban architecture proposals with different graphic documents made by the teams and it allows to link together the topic and the different scales of reflexion approached by the programme "Dwelling in the year 2000, housing, city and nature".
Information: Europan@club-internet.fr