A Manual on Urbanism

Even before the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games took place this last summer, Paris boasted that 95% of the venues were either existing or temporary, with only one new venue built: the Paris 2024 Olympic Aquatics Centre. Centered on the Saint-Denis neighborhood in Paris's northern suburbs, the 2024 Summer Games raised the bar for sustainability in the Olympics, particularly with its focus on the realms of conservation and reuse. While the same boastful attributes cannot be applied in the same manner to the Olympic Village — the newly built residential district housing the thousands of visiting athletes for the months of the Games — the Athletes Village planned by Dominique Perrault Architecture (DPA) commendably integrates itself into the existing Saint-Ouen/Saint-Denis neighborhoods, reconnects with the Seine, and anticipates its future as a mixed-use district for Parisians.

Architect and planner Dominique Perrault's new book, A Village and Its Double (also available in French), generously shares the process of planning the Olympic Village to meet the requirements of the Olympics as well as Paris's sustainability agenda. It is a thick, image-saturated book that other architects-slash-planners should find of value. The book begins with an interview between Perrault and historian Frédéric Prot that touches on many of the important aspects of the masterplan and how it relates to some of DPA's past projects, many in the planning realm and quite a few focused on Olympics in other cities. DPA started on the project in 2016 and won a competition for it in 2018, leaving very little time to develop the plan, build a large team consisting of nearly twenty architecture firms, and realize their designs. The plan was guided by thirteen ambitions — the same thirteen ambitions that organize the book.

Like any architecture or planning project, DPA first looked at the history of the site, focusing on industry in the 19th century and its most famous contemporary occupant, the Cité du Cinéma, the film studio founded by director Luc Besson and built inside a renovated power plant in 2012. The analysis of the site comprises the first ambition, “Territorial Anchoring,” which then segues into the second ambition, “Urban Identity.” In the latter, the ghost of the area's industrial past, kept partly alive by the Cité du Cinéma, inspired the image of the “Boat Islands” — seven blocks, including the film studio, oriented toward the Seine.

The third ambition — and arguably the most important of all of them — is “The Reversible City,” which envisions the plan in the long term: as a metropolitan mixed-use district starting when the athletes depart. This ambition sees Perrault the planner jostling with Perrault the architect, with numerous collages questioning what could be possible for the site both during and after the Olympics. Corresponding to this forward-thinking ambition is the next pair, ambitions 4 and 5: “Climate in 2050” and “Carbon Footprint Management.” Given that the Olympic Village is the largest piece of new construction for the Parisian Summer Games, the planning and design of the buildings in terms of materials, energy use, and other considerations aims at limiting carbon emissions. Likewise, ambition 6, “Energy and Production in Cities,” examines how the impact of introducing so much density and people in a short amount of time impacts energy and other infrastructures.

Given Paris's recent embrace of bike lanes and the 15-minute city, the seventh ambition, “Accessible Mobility,” is appropriately aligned with a reduction of car usage in the city. It is suitably followed by “Water and Soil.” This eighth ambition refers to ecology, such as via rainwater management and vegetation, but also the experience of the athletes and future inhabitants of the district who would have direct access to the Seine. The latter is enabled by a leveling and gradual sloping of the formerly elevated topography. “Water and Soil” is followed by number 9, “Biodiversity in Urban Areas,” and number 10, “Sport in the City”; the latter embraces the continuing use of Olympic sports facilities and their integration into metropolitan areas.

By this point in the book, on might be asking, “What about urban design? What about the buildings?” They are addressed in ambition 11, “Urban Furniture and Lighting,” and ambition 12, “Choral Architecture.” The first is thoroughly detailed in drawings and other images, but the second, with its myriad architects and their buildings, is easily the longest chapter in the book. A few of the architects include Brenac & Gonzalez & Associés, Chaix&Morel, and COBE, with Atelier Georges, Taktyk, and other landscape architects. Means of creating cohesion across the diversity of architects working buildings within the “Boat Islands” are found primarily in ground-floor retail podiums and, above them, a terracotta palette for the facades punctuated by balconies. In Perrault's words, “For each big ship, or big building, there was a captain, or rather an architect, whose mission was to harmonize and ensure the cohesion and coherence of the team and the block.”

The last of the thirteen ambitions is “The Heart of the Heart,” referring to the Cité du Cinéma that sits in the center of the Olympic Village and was used as the main catering facility for athletes during the Games. With its impressive nave space, the Cité du Cinéma “will make the neighborhood shine beyond itself,” in Perrault's words. The architect therefore imaged the building serving other uses, be it a sports hall, a library, or a cinematic “nave of culture.” This 13th and last ambition elevates adaptive reuse, in line with the 95% reuse of sports complexes in Paris for the 2024 Games, but it is not the last chapter; it is followed by aerial photographs of the Olympic Village site before, during, and after construction. Two photos of the completed Olympic Village show the culmination of the 800-page manual and the many hours of hard work by all the people involved, but they also hint at the site's post-Olympic future now unfolding.