Dominique Perrault creates a garden city by the Seine

In September 2017, Paris was chosen as the host city of the Olympic Games in 2024, exactly one hundred years after the French capital last hosted the event. Last year, a tender was released calling for an urban architectural team to design the Olympic and Paralympic Village situated across the islands of Saint-Denis, Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen. Selected firm Dominique Perrault have now released images of the completed master plan, which includes 2400 housing units and 119,000 sq m of offices and related facilities. 

The project looks beyond the Olympics, with the designers creating a new permanent district on the 51-hectare site. Conceived as a garden city by the water's edge, the Village will accept its first post-Games inhabitants as early as 2025. The site has direct access to the motorway and is located near an express train station, giving visitors from the city centre easy access to the new development. As well as incorporating the river and its landscape, the Village site also encompasses local industrial heritage, including the power plants which used to supply electricity to the Paris Metro. Overall, the planners sought to meet future goals for both sustainability and accessibility. 

Dominique Perrault placed the design’s approach to location in the context of previous influential French urban plans, including Le Corbusier’s vision of separate but integrated city sectors and Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s public works programme commissioned by Napoleon III. Perrault stated: "If the nineteenth century was marked by an urban geography, including Haussmann, and the twentieth century by Le Corbusier and a zoning geography, the twenty-first century will be marked by a geography of the territory in which the public space is built. At all scales, the Olympic and Paralympic Village is an opportunity to be a showcase territory in this respect and to be exemplary in terms of sustainability."

Lucy Nordberg
TenderStream Head of Research

This tender was first published by TenderStream on 08.02.2018 here

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