Grand Paris: Architects reveal plans to transform French capital

The Telegraph ^ | 3/12/2009 | Henry Samuel in Paris

[bruinbirdman]

Ten of the world's leading architects on Thursday detailed their plans to dramatically transform the French capital into a Grand Paris, in what has been described as the most complex city project ever.

A computer image of a project for a bigger and greener Paris, in La Courneuve, by French architect Roland Castro

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, asked the architects, including Britain's Richard Rogers, to project 20 years into the future and dream up the world's most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis.

Among the more outlandish plans is Antoine Grumbach's proposal to extend the city all the way to the Channel port of Le Havre via Rouen along the Seine, maximising the green possibilities of the river. The idea was already mooted by Napoleon Bonaparte, who said: "Paris-Rouen-Le Havre: one single city with the Seine as its main road."

Christophe de Portzamparc, the prize-winning French architect, has proposed building four economic "buds" in an "archipelago" around the capital and transferring a huge European train station to Aubervilliers, north of Paris, modelled on London's St Pancras.

Roland Castro, the prominent 1968 Leftist who suggested moving the Elysée Palace to the tough northeastern suburbs, has proposed injecting "beauty" into a "Grand Paris of poets", which would include new cultural landmarks in a capital shaped like a huge eight-petal flower and with a New York-style Central Park on the grim housing project of La Courneuve.

The Italian architects Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigano have proposed enlarging the city and laying it out as a "porous sponge", where waterways are given pride of place.

Yves Liot would like to create 20 "sustainable towns" of 500,000 within the Paris area. He would also double the number of forests and bring fields to Paris' outskirts so the urban dwellers could cultivate their

[353FMG]

Building more places for muslim youts to destroy.

[max americana]

I don’t see any mosques. And the benches should face Mecca..

[2banana]

I think they left out a few mosques in the skyline...

[dfwgator]

Where are the fires?

[constitutiongirl]

Looks like NYC from Central Park. Real original.

[nufsed]

post-Kyoto? Is that a design style?

Aren't we post-Kyoto now and didn't it die when the US senate blasted it out of the water??

[denydenydeny]

...bigger and greener Paris

The cynic in me thinks that "bigger" is the operative word: Essentially bringing all those backward rural communities under the political authority of "progressive" urban polities.

[iowamark]

dream up the world's most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis.

ROTFL