INHERITED FRAMEWORKS aims to explore the transformation of an existing parking structure into a housing project in Paris. The goal is to establish a reciprocal link between architecture and the city, considering the architectural project as part of a longer story and a broader composition where each element expresses the values of the whole.
Why a transformation project?
Rehabilitation and transformation projects of existing structures, besides their evident ecological and environmental benefits, are fertile grounds for innovation. They are true creative adventures where the architectural project evolves through non-linear stages. Layering the new onto the old without erasing it, revealing the, sometimes unexpected, potential of what exists, extending the spirit of the place through new uses, finding the subtle balance between memory and modernity, and integrating into the walls of the past without arrogance or paralyzing veneration are topics that should engage the competence and creativity of architects. To address these challenges, the design process must move away from the linear narrative of funnel scales - thinking first about the territory or the city and gradually arriving at the building, window, detail - to adopt a hyper-reactive adaptation strategy, fully open to discovery and the opportunities of what already exists. The coherence of choices resulting from these transcalar considerations only becomes apparent afterward. It's a radical shift in the architect's way of thinking.
Rehabilitation first means understanding the heritage, its potential, and its limits before subjecting it to transformative actions. It's being attentive to places until they surprise us and proposing additions or modifications. It's continually reevaluating the project and moving step by step. The incremental dimension of the process becomes the sole guarantee of balance between the efforts invested and the qualitative benefits derived. This is the economy of the project.
The synthetic and unitary logic characterizing architectural form gives way to a new architecture of stratifications, superpositions, and additions: a new form augmented by form, a new architecture augmented by architecture.
Why Paris?
Paris is the densest city in Europe in terms of population and human density - inhabitants + jobs and among the 5 densest cities in the world. At the origin of this model are the work and thought of a central figure, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. From 1853 to 1870, as Prefect, he completely reformulated the foundations of the city according to the values of the nineteenth-century modernity. If we consider the size of the urban fabric involved (75% of the built environment) and the speed of the works (in less than 20 years), we can easily consider his intervention as a fully planned and designed new city project.
Deciphering Haussmann’s urban fabric through dissection, classification, and comparative analysis reveals its properties. At each level, the urban fabric expresses characteristics ensuring fundamental balances: density and viability, permanence and resilience, sobriety and diversity, connectivity of long and short distances, identity and universality, intensity and a welcoming urban spirit, and between attractiveness and inclusiveness.
Why automobile garages?
After World War I, the automobile became commonplace, and its rapid and spectacular success gave rise to a new architectural archetype: the hotel for automobiles, later called a garage or parking. The years 1946-1973 witnessed a wave of construction of "Grand Garages" in Paris. Like cinema or airports, the garage-parking is one of the modern programs par excellence: a multi-story building, reinforced concrete, characterized by a ramp. Its form is streamlined to the extreme: elementary, technically and economically optimized, potentially repetitive and duplicable indefinitely. The values of modernist progress are embodied in these structures, and 29 quai de Grenelle is part of this wave.
Approximately 70 years later, around 65% of Parisian households no longer have a car, and garages-parkings have gradually lost their utility to become new land opportunities. Due to their "absence of program, neutral and generic character, allowing them to be understood as possible, even ideal, containers for programmatic indecision and the constant evolution of uses," these architectures have become privileged territories for urban evolutions today.
This is not an urban planning class or a dogmatic exercise in the notion of context. Throughout this semester, we will erase the limits between different scales and disciplines to place the architectural project once again at the center of urban challenges and opportunities.*
"We realize that architecture only constitutes one aspect of a more complex reality or a particular structure. At the same time, for being the most recent verifiable data of this reality, it represents the most concrete perspective possible for dealing with this challenge."
A. Rossi, The Architecture of the City, Opposition Books, Cambridge, 1984.
