SEASIDE BOULEVARD I E13 Winner
Europan 13 - Saint-Brieuc, France
Cyril Breton, Pierre-Olivier Carpentier, Maxime Genévrier.
Saint-Brieuc has given its name to a bay. It is a broad bay based on an ecosystem in which the tidal range has always ruled the settlement of men and town’s life. Forward of the bay, where deep sea is permanent, towns have naturally grown around the shores and beaches, whereas at the end of the bay towns have settled a few kilometres away from the sea in the inner lands.
This situation is a key issue in the project. With the LGV extending (Ligne à Grand Vitesse - French high speed train) Saint-Brieuc is given the opportunity to become the only city of the bay that is directly accessible with high speed trains and tightly linked to the sea. The old and still existing railway (for freight transport and tourism between Le Port du Légué and the train station) is reshaped as a seaside Boulevard. The latter would be the matrix for urban interventions that fit the encountered landscapes, the topographies, the programs and specific land owning opportunities. This course across the city is the area where experiments come up and provide an opportunity to offer promising prospects to the surrounding environment.
a re-assembled PUZZLE of landscapes
Reorienting Saint-Brieuc towards the bay implies understanding the land-based places, made of steep valleys covered with woods, surrounded by heavy and massive bridges, wide agricultural highlands that slowly slope to seashores. Cut by large geological entities, Saint-Brieuc’s landscapes can be compared to dispersed pieces of a puzzle. It is very complex to go from one to another. However each pieces of the puzzle contains a part of the maritime identity which has to be linked to the full scale territory : the rivers Gouët, Gouëdic, Douvenant, the Cesson cape, the Valais beach, the harbour, and the old town. Seaside Boulevard combines every pieces in a panoramic and continuous landscape. For instance, a student can leave his/ her campus for a moment and go to the Légué harbour for sailing. Another Saint-Brieuc inhabitant can go to the Valais beaches while enjoying a large view on the Douvenant valley and the Yffiniac shores. A sailing entrepreneur of the Légué could run to catch a TGV after strolling in the inner city squares. The valleys of Gouëdic, Douvenant and Gouët are far from being constraints that stigmatise Saint-Brieuc as the “three valleys city” but they become the stages of a course across “the seaside town of Saint-Brieuc”.
a MATRIX for new projects
Seaside Boulevard is an area and a route for experiments that shows and reveals new urban territories. It is mainly a space to promote new projects that are based on innovating urban planning process. The area of the Boulevard thickens and reduces according to land owning opportunities, accessibility and long run projects (the Légué area, the train station area, the Chaptal area). The strong relationship between economy, social issues and the dynamic route of the Boulevard will allow Saint-Brieuc to move forward. On a wider scale, the Seaside Boulevard could become the framework and the limit for the inner city expansion. It preserves the natural environment. The Boulevard also offers a new environment for considering the town urbanism by containing all the needed facilities inside the Boulevard perimeter. The environment is designed as an urban area and permits to preserve free agricultural lands.
TOOLS for urban interventions
Seaside Boulevard aims to change the way people live and to understand the city by carrying out small projects all along its course. In such an era of adaptability and shared decision-making, this change of point of view could be led by long-run negotiated process. The project gathers multiple contextual issues and answers to them by using so called “Tools”. They are also the scope of interventions just as much as the guiding principle of the project in the same time. Nine Tools have been planned to answer the issues of the two operational sites (the city centre and the Légué hub). Each Tool defines a principle for the intervention which is about to be at the core of the project design : floors adaptability, soil preservation, active modes...
These Tools can be combined and used in different ways in each of those project sites. They can even disappear in the long run. They are not defined by a precise operational scale and time. It allows every members of the projects to imagine their own answers in a common framework that assures the consistency to the scale of the whole town.
Strategic map
Tool 01 - active grounds
Saint-Brieuc is one of these symbolic cities of Brittany where granite is everywhere. The project draws up the actual granite architectural expression to enhance it and link it to the functions of the grounds. Today, the shapes, the geological origins of the stones and their geometry make the public spaces easier to read. This Tool widens the mosaic of granite by preserving the links between utility and a wide range of materials. Bitumen of the city centre squares is replaced by a new kind of slabs in blue granite. It defines the places for static and temporary functions (market, concert, exhibition). Elsewhere, the space between joints permits the drain of rainwater. When the Boulevard goes through porous soils, joints are replaced by vegetation in the slabs. Thanks to this Tool, the Seaside Boulevard offers a new (but still regional) chromatic scheme to the city. This Tool is also a social process. Road works involve big disturbances, including inhabitants to the design of the grounds-leads to a social dynamic. Building the new spaces with them can give birth to particular geometries.
Tool 02 - islands of empty spaces
The project raises the question of rhythm between empty spaces and built volumes in the city and how it can generate a legible composition. Saint-Brieuc is made of wide empty spaces (squares, parks) that do not really structure the city. There is a need to offer opportunities to see the building by calling into the question the legitimacy of car parking which are overflowing the city centre. It can be resolved by restricting street furniture and creating a flat ground for pedestrians. The project highlights the emptiness as well as the volumes of the buildings. This Tool aims to reveal the existing empty spaces and to create others all along the Boulevard. It first needs to identify strategic places and to free them from furniture, car parks and obstacles for bicycles and pedestrians. As far as it is necessary, cars could still drive through the city centre. The places are given back to the Saint-Bieuc inhabitants and the free empty spaces allow to welcome urban events such as markets and the moving platforms (going out from the Linked Towers). It aims to allow commercial, social and cultural activities to use and invest the public space. The “Islands of empty spaces” Tool should permit to create places of interactive exchange for innovating local projects.
Tool 03 - linked towers network
Multiple activities have spread in the Saint-Brieuc’s territory. They are, most of the time, far from each other and not much connected either. For instance the Carré Rosengart, which contains sailing and digital business, does not have the place to set up in the city centre. It goes the same for the cultural activities of the Conservatoire and the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie. With multi programmatic buildings, the Linked Towers Network purpose is to allow both tourists and Saint-Brieuc citizens to access to the current an future activities of the city. These small towers are positioned on strategic land parcels with dilapidated buildings, mainly at square corners, in order to be better seen from the nearby streets. It is both an economic and architectural network. This Tool must act as the beginning of the renewal neighbourhoods which were ailing. It is mostly the case for the city centre that suffers from demographic and business decline. Linked Towers are designed as playful buildings and are partly mobile. They also trigger a new brand image for Saint-Brieuc.
Tool 04 - Multi-modal route
The Multi-Modal route is the largest mobility loop which draws the Seaside Boulevard. It consists of two parts: the first one links the train station to the city centre, the second one is the old railway. While every alternative mobility solutions are studied, it is clear that this facility and land parcels are still there. This railway links in a smooth slope the city centre (train station - altitude 100m) to the harbour (alt. 0m) and the main activity poles university / sea / harbour). This Tool is not a permanent solution for mobility. It raises the question of the way the existing railway facility could enhance the projects of the Boulevard. Three options are possible :
Option 1 : a tram-train between the train station and Légué harbour and a full route for active modes. The railway has to be enlarged at the intermediate stations to allow trains to cross (travel time between train Station and Légué : 14 min). A bicycling lane follows the railway, when possible.
Option 2 : 100% Bicycle (possible at Saint-Brieuc Too) A giant bicycling lane would cover the whole loop including the city centre, the rue des 3 frères Le Goff and the former railway, enjoying soft slopes.
Option 3 : smart cars on the railway
Brand new transportation facilities- that can be combined- would usethe old railway (autonomous cars, vehicles that can be interlocked with each other).
Tool 05 - hybrid heritage
Seaside Boulevard reveals an important architectural heritage : old factories, power plant, Douvenant viaducts, etc. These samples of former activities are sometimes barely interesting but they strongly represent Saint-Brieuc’s image and became trademarks of the rolling landscape. This Tool’s purpose is to link the symbolic aspect of these historic heritage to the new functions of the Boulevard. Hijacking and hybridizing the original functions of these buildings will allow the Saint-Brieuc’s inhabitants to seize them. A wall or even a slab can be a basis for a new project. Hybrid heritage is a reflexion to adapt the project to the economical issues in the long run.
Tool 06 - Macro-architecture
Following the ideas of great engineering and architectural structures that are all along the Saint-Brieuc’s landscape, the project propose to punctuate the Boulevard with monumental architectural mass. The Majestic viaducts of Côtes-d’Armor are an integral part of the territory and the rolling landscape. It would be unthinkable to get rid of them. This Tool raises the question of size. The contrast in scales created by the insertion of new volumes trigger a dialogue with the great landscape. This is a proposal for a historical change. The monumental issue is no longer a part of transport structures. Architecture must be included in this issue and reveal the shape of the whole place. It is time to make the depth of the valley visible, as well as the slope panorama, the opened landscape on the naked bay when the sea is down. The Boulevard could not exist without these architectural downtimes which allow the viewers to see at a glance. Thinking about Macro-Architecture implies to understand the role of the project with the natural entities : building a site to reveal another one, seeing to be seen. Architecture and sizes are ruled by the Topography and have to be continuously dealt with the context in which it evolves,even put aside from other elements. Macro-architecture punctuates the Boulevard like a contrasting rhythm of volumes.
Tool 07- flexible floors
The Boulevard, matrix for new projects, could become the opportunity to imagine innovating places to live. They have to answer to the actual issues of people housing. The evolution of life style and mobility, family change, expectation for houses with gardens , all these facts allow to imagine how a new housing offer complement the
existing one. Flexible Floors dictate the evolution of the buildings around the Boulevard. On the lower pier of Légué, a group of new buildings with housing and activity follow the structure of the Armez pier. A new urban life
is organised by collective dwellings between the street and the river Gouët. A land is preserved between each buildings. It is a community garden for inhabitants and a common part for two buildings. If necessary, this garden can be built step by step for the collective owners in order to create an additional room (bedroom, office, workshop). Depending on the situations, different processes would be used. The evolution will be the functions of economic and social conditions of the area. On a larger scale, this new housing would allow the town council to fight against the intense development of suburban housing in the South-West of the town, notably by upgrading the housing offer in the city centre, Cesson, Légué, and Chaptal area.
Tool 08 - Community and cultural gardens
Art is a common good, it brings a new point of view about the human era and spaces. It has always been a new light on Breton coasts and has aroused people’s interests. The project aims to carry on this tradition by making culture a support for discovery and knowledge of the territory. Ephemeral routes with artworks follow the paths of the Seaside Boulevard, between city and nature. The lower shores of the Légué site is one of these new artistic routes. A path is updated along the Gouët river. This unknown site is given back to the city and inhabitants. It regularly becomes wider, leaving space for depolluted plants which are lined with low walls. These places are available to all in order to welcome ephemeral artworks. It allows associations to cultivate community gardens. Dialogue between art and nature comes up. These places for relaxing are the gardens of Saint-Brieuc’s urban spaces. Each artistic route has its own architectural language, it can continually evolve with exhibitions over the years. Simple architectural entities (that are sometimes already existing) emphasise landscapes features, changes of direction in the course and reliefs to climb. For instance, along the Gouët river, the project proposes new stairs linking the embankments and the streets. It is the Souzain stairs sustained by the old viaduct foundations. Little walls give the limits of the gardens in the woods, whereas at the junction with Quai Armez, few stairs go down to water.
Tool 09 - volumetric land parcel
In order to protect soils ecology and land owning mutability and to adapt the Boulevard to multiple contexts, this Tool submits new buildings to new real estate process. This Tool proposes, as the case may be, that properties are no more considered as surfaces but volumes. The ground remains the property of a specific association that can be public or not. Every new house owner has a volume to build and the foundations are still managed by
public urbanism. The ground stays free from building. Development: the access at the house is situated from the top of the site. Therefore, the property owner stay the master of its evolution. The deck houses on the lower site of the Légué are reflective of this principle. Decks are designed to physically and visually link the streets to the riversides of Gouët. They are lanes to access the building volumes. The ground is left for a slow depollution by plants. Over the years, owners of volumes could ask for an extension. When the soil would be depolluted, he could reach the open floor opening to a community garden. The Linked Towers are based on this principle too. The ground floor, the highest floor and the stairs are public (or owned by an association) whereas the other floors are divided into free volumes. This Tool opens new perspectives to better imagine new urban forms, that will punctuate the Seaside Boulevard.
Contextualised Tools on squares of City Centre
Contextualised Tools on lower an higher Légué Harbour
Connected landscapes
BAY AREAS
Seaside Boulevard is a working method based on existing entities. It evolves according to new opportunities, future urban functions, hazards and issues which are unknown and that could come up one day. Thanks to the evolving and combinable Tools system, Seaside Boulevard is deliberately at multi-scales and multi-stage temporality. If the Légué and the city centre sites are defined and operational in the short run, the other possible project sites should be suitable to rank priorities and intentions. Seaside Boulevard, through the Tools system, is designed to be available at town scale in many sites as necessaries. The Gouëdic valley could be linked to the Boulevard system and have an urban project. There would be a need to formulate intentions and to cross these chosen Tools. The whole project would shape a common urban strategy for the full town scale. Seaside Boulevard could also echoes the littoral improvement at regional scale (for instance it could be linked to the
renewal of the Chemins de Fer des Côtes du Nord, with all the Harel de la Noë viaducts). The Boulevard is a revealing place of the bay, which deserves to be fully seen. It also announces the renewal of the brand image of Saint-Brieuc with the expansion of the LGV (French high-speed trains). It is also a way to design spaces in a adaptable way which would highlight existing basis. Seaside Boulevard changes the residents’ reading and point of view of the territory by developing punctuated urban interventions with an improvement of the mutability potential for project areas. It is both a space and a time process that extends the actions in progress and sets the bay at the very heart of the territorial development and in the daily life of Saint-Brieuc, seaside city.