Objets en Seine: Ecotone, Smooth, Frame.

Final Diploma Project.
Supervisor: Vincent Dupont-Rougier.
Ensci 2011.

How to give the Seine River back to pedestrians without necessarily removing motor vehicles?

“Voies Georges Pompidou” arteries in Paris are just not enough anymore. In fact they had been built to accommodate the capital city to the Automobile. Today this space is neither entirely private nor entirely public: it has become insignificant and anonymous."Objets en Seine" is a draft alternative highways layout proposed to the City of Paris in 2009, including plans to close the left bank expressway and turn the right bank in a traffic light regulated boulevard. But the river banks are structuring and efficient communication axes for Paris, so the balance between otium and negocium must be met; bring together streams of cars, (motor)cyclists and pedestrians. The role of the designer, in this context, is to re-qualify this space, i.e. rename it so that it becomes an inhabited place: an ecotone, a place of ecological transition between the city and the river, which lays on a lacunar landscape: the abandoned spaces of this expressway.Urban and landscaping walks along the Seine are achievable by the design and implementation of an emblematic feature: the smooth continuum becomes a frame supporting a variety of uses. Can the industrial matter, when settled in a wide program, claim to build space within the city? This project seeks to apply the methodology disclosed by any lost-and-found service, based not on a reset logic but on a clean slate layers and an overlay stitching work: the city space is precisely that area where diverse scale sizes meet.My degree gives me the unique opportunity to emphasize the specific role of the urban designer.

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