FORT
DE
VILLIERS
Project type: Offices, Residential, Cultural
Location: Noisy-le-Grand, France
Client: Municipality of Noisy-le-Grand
Project leader: Petr Obraztsov, Leandro Soares
Surface built : 21 350 m²
Status: Competition entry
From military to social, from social to associative, the fort has seen different epochs and periods. But its essence and meaning are strongly related to the concept of strength. How to reinterpret this ever-changing concept in terms of the program and architectural layout? The history of the fort shows how the same shape can contain different functions while preserving its originality. This shape thereby is the most important heritage that has to be preserved and valorized. The architectural layout has to take into account multiple things, but it has to start from the fort itself. This is the grounding foundation of our proposal - to reinforce the fort by creating a monumental housing enclosure, a built envelope generating a new urban logic, bringing back the accent to the fort itself.
In the second time the envelope has to dialogue with its surroundings: the highway, big scale urban experimentations of Noisy-le-Grand, mid-scale collective dwellings and detached suburban houses. That’s why three different types of buildings are proposed: one making a monumental bridge with Noisy le Grand’s center, the second creating a transition between separate and collective houses and the third putting an accent on the fort - an inhabited vegetated hill. The duality between new housing complex and the fort allows for coexistence of actual society needs and the heritage from the past.
The second part of the program rediscovers the concept of strength. From past to present, from military to civil, it engages into creation of tensions between existing features while bringing a fresh input of lacking ones. The fort becomes a new urban garden consisting of a central space, four esplanades, multiple platforms and a peripheric downline promenade. The central part of the complex becomes a new organizing element for sport activities - multi-functional health center complementing big scale sport infrastructures with small scale activities. Other pavilions of the fort form a network of cultural envelope putting into tension sport with culture.They generate multiple activities and host temporary events. The heart of the fort becomes a playground of crossed activities bringing a richness to its programming and creating unexpected results. The ditch takes a function of a loop landscape park with three different types of vegetation, water stream and a promenade for walking, running and chilling. It proposes to rediscover the fort from a completely new point of view and in this way valorize military heritage of the fort’s wall enclosure.
