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Case

Buildings

Climate change adaptation

Flood prevention

+2

Reinvent Paris

12. December 2016

Solution provider

SLA architects

Award winning SLA is a Danish architecture practice, which creates modern, adaptable cities that inspire community and diversity through innovative use of nature, design, sustainability and technology. The projects solve some of today’s hardest urban problems while creating genuine urban qualities that add new meaning our cities.

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City nature in three dimensions

New green attractions at street level and 5,000 m2 urban life and city nature lifted high above Paris’ facades and roofs tie the city together with its suburbs and add a new dimension to living and working in Paris.

Last year, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, invited architects all over the world to reinvent the French Capital in an international competition asking for an environmental and sustainable approach. In the project Ternes-Villiers, SLA’s winning project covers the Boulevard Périphérique, the big ring road that circles around the entire city, as it discovers urban life and city nature in three dimensions.

The project rethinks the relationship between Paris and its suburbs, connecting instead of dividing. A green, urban 5,000 m2 roof deck is put across the Boulevard Périphérique, to create a strong link between the city and suburban intimately. Combining a city nature-based ecosystem services, fully climate-adapted urban spaces and new social meeting places with underground parking, pedestrian-friendly connections and large roof terraces, which among other things will house a tea plantation. SLA works with city nature and urban life as complete ecosystems and creates brand new urban experiences and green contexts in an otherwise grey and traffic-congested part of Paris.

Currently, Le Boulevard Périphérique is a barrier between the city center and the suburbs and is left disconnected with a lack of coherent structure, and the site faces many different challenges from pollution of the air and rainwater to very loud traffic noise.

The boulevard will function as a new performative green-filter machine that deals with these problems, where the site acts as a nourishing and biodiverse processing machine, cleansing the ring road beneath it. The collected rainwater is used as an apparatus to filter the air and noise, harnessing negative resources and turning them into positive attributes, that create clean water and air and turning the boulevard into a green, sustainable and recreational space.

The project is done in close collaboration with Jacques Ferrier Architectures and Chartier Dalix (building architects)