Parc De La Villette Plan Drawing Oma

How the Parc de la Villette Kickstarted a New Era for Urban Blueprint

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What does the Parisian park look like? For many, the answer to that question comes in the class of a painting: Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in which the well-dressed bourgeoisie leisurely relish a natural haven on a verdant isle within their industrializing urban center.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

But what does the xx-offset-century Parisian park expect like? The answer to this more than nuanced question, posed past the French government in a 1982 design competition, comes in the grade of Bernard Tschumi'due south Parc de la Villette, where a then-radical landscape gear up a precedent for urban parks in the decades to follow.

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Today's heavily-trafficked Parc de la Villette sits what was one time an expansive nineteenth-century slaughterhouse in Northeast Paris. The butchery—built in 1867 as part of Businesswoman von Haussmann's renovation of Paris—closed in 1974, leaving a swath of state rife for redevelopment. Seeking innovative ways to reimagine the space, French president François Mitterrand sponsored a competition (as part of his "Grands Projects" initiative to modernize the state's monuments and public spaces) that chosen for international entries, garnering responses from the likes of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. The contest brief, entitled "Urban Park for the 21st Century," gear up forth a program that extended, even in its proper name, far beyond Paris, seeking to broadly redefine the public park.

Butchery (slaughterhouse) at La Villette

The competition'due south winner, Bernard Tschumi, used his blueprint equally a way to respond to the trials of the contemporary metropolis. But where earlier landscape architects similar Frederick Constabulary Olmsted, who designed New York'due south Fundamental Park, conceived of the urban park as a place to escape from the city, Tschumi viewed the park as a continuation of the urban center. Specifically, the builder responded to a growing sense in the belatedly 20th century that the urban center was as well big, too anonymous, and as well inhuman. The park, in plow, mimics the feeling of urban disorientation: signage is purposefully deficient and paths curve irregularly, leading visitors to nowhere in particular. And despite the site's history, Tschumi purposefully avoids historical reference in an attempt to make the park a "non-identify" where people volition deport on their ain terms, non in accordance with historical norms for park beliefs (think: Seurat'south Sunday Afternoon). As such, critics of Tschumi's Parc de la Villette—like the Project for Public Spaces, which listed the park as tertiary on their list of the world'due south worst parks—condemn information technology as non-convenient.

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Tschumi'south now well-known scheme for the park involved a grid upon which sat points, lines, and surfaces; these theoretical concepts translated respectively into red structures (points), nonsensically curving paths (lines), and landscaped green-space (surfaces). Most famous are the structures, which Tschumi referred to equally "follies" in a nod to the non-functional merely whimsical structures of the English language garden tradition. Built as forms without articulate functions, the all-red structures are evenly spaced through the park, becoming an orienting intervention in the large city park.

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The park'south structural features, designed by Tschumi, are paired with the cultural centers it houses, among them museums, concert halls, and Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie de Paris. As institutions bring people into the park, information technology becomes even more and then a continuation of the metropolis—a fulfillment of Tschumi's theoretical agenda. The park's activity and vitality, and so, derive in office from its peculiarity (what other park houses 35 contemporary follies?) and in office from its programming.

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What does the xx-first-century Parisian park look similar? To Bernard Tschumi, it's a place where people play with follies, navigate winding paths, and, ultimately, interact with each other. If Seurat's subjects came to the park in nineteenth-century Paris for the sake of relaxation—lounging carelessly on sloping greenery—we come to the park in the 21st century in role for the aforementioned reasons equally Seraut'due south subjects, but nosotros also have a renewed purpose: social interaction. Indeed, a growing consensus, evident in myriad academic papers and work like the Reimagining the Civic Eatables projection (supported by The Knight Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation,) sees the public park as a vital infinite for cross-cultural, inter-neighborhood contact in the increasingly digital and segregated city. Encouraged homo interaction is, it seems, what makes a practiced park in the 21st century—even across Paris.

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Cite: Ella Comberg. "How the Parc de la Villette Kickstarted a New Era for Urban Design" 10 Aug 2018. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://world wide web.archdaily.com/899597/how-the-parc-de-la-villette-kickstarted-a-new-era-for-urban-blueprint> ISSN 0719-8884

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Source: https://www.archdaily.com/899597/how-the-parc-de-la-villette-kickstarted-a-new-era-for-urban-design

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