AU FIL DE L’EAU
The "Au fil de l'eau" project is located in the Ivry-Port Nord district, a district in transition and a hinge zone between the Bercy-Charenton and Massena-Bruneseau ZACs on the Paris side, and Ivry Confluences on the Ivry-sur-Seine side.
The district is mainly made up of industrial and tertiary activities buildings, and suffers from a flagrant lack of housing and urban life. The project proposes to address this shortfall by following two fundamental principles:
- A mixed-use programme combining hotels, offices and trans-generational residences, able to combine student residences and residences for the elderly as an expression of new typologies adapted to contemporary social reality.
- Vertical densification with two emergences to free up ground floors and redeploy the urban space from the private one (visual openings, shared green spaces, open spaces).
The two buildings, Building A on Quai Marcel Boyer and Building B on Rue François Mitterrand, seeks a harmonious but non-repetitive match of facades, while affirming the presence of the Seine, and the traditional movement of barges, by incorporating round openings applied in different ways along the facades, as the water flows.
We are also maintaining the notion of a pedestal, which runs along Quai Marcel Boyer, in order to preserve an urban morphology that extends from the Pathé-Truffaut building to the E. Leclerc building, including the current FNAC head office.
"Au fil de l'eau", an original and contemporary urban link for the town of Ivry-sur-Seine, to establish a new, pleasant and peaceful urban continuity between Paris and the major urban project of the ZAC Ivry Confluences. Neighbouring the very high density planned in the Bruneau Nord sector, notably Jean Nouvel's Duo towers, the project is less than 500 metres from buildings with heights ranging from R+25 to R+37. The constraint of not exceeding the height of R+16 in this sector of Ivry is very present in the architectural project, which will have to seek a relevant language in order to mark the entrance to the city. At the same time, the Ivry Port Nord district is a tough neighbourhood, a business park with little housing, consisting mainly of large commercial containers and office buildings dating from the 1980s. However, the proximity of the nearby Seine (the project is located 80m from the river's edge) adds a poetic element to this district, which we feel is a very sensitive area for the treatment of facades: the river flows, barges and boats pass by in a constant to-and-fro movement, the mists on the water blur the boundaries of the river.... But you have to go down to the Quai bas to really see it... The language of the windows on these boats will enable us to set up a narrative that will allow us to work the many windows that make up the project in a more amiable form, that of portholes, in contrast to the square windows of the surrounding offices. The ensemble of two buildings, Building A on Quai Marcel Boyer and Building B on Rue François Mitterrand, seeks a harmonious but non-repetitive match of facades, while affirming the presence of the Seine, and the traditional movement of barges, by incorporating round holes applied in different ways along the facades, as the water flows by.
The two buildings have rounded corners to soften their volumetry, and the trans-generational residence will be covered in a textile mesh that will rescale the building, extrapolating the size of the windows behind and at the same time acting as a solar filter for the entire volumetry. This mesh will also act as a 'buffer' against bad weather, particularly torrential rain and increasingly frequent wind due to climate change.
A second area of work has been to establish the landscape as an infrastructure to support the expected built density. A new street connecting Rue F. Mitterrand with Quai Marcel Boyer has been created and handed back to the town in order to reduce the existing public space. This new street is closely linked to the landscaping of the project at the heart of the block and runs vertically up the "Opportunity Wall" that links the two buildings along the party wall and covers the existing wall of the cinemas with a work by artists Louise Decruck and Dimitri Arnaoudov. This wall of opportunities hosts a mixed programme dedicated to culture and agriculture. It will be co-constructed with local residents.
