Reinvent Paris. - Ternes Villiers
City nature in three dimensions
Curious for more?
Line Agnes Bjørløw Skjærlund
Head of Business Development, Associate Partner
Location
Paris, France
Size
5,000 m2
Year
2016 — ongoing
Client
BNP Paribas Real Estate
Partners & Collaborators
Jacques Ferrier Architectures and Chartier Dalix. Visualizations by Beauty and the Bit.
Urban life and city nature in three dimensions. This is the main concept of SLA’s winning project in the international mega competition Reinventer Paris.
SLA and the team won one of the competition’s most central projects, Ternes-Villiers, by creating a scalable model and strategy for how we can create social and green values and functionality when building – as long as the buildings perform nature. In this case, the ecosystem services of nature will be working from both the roofs, facades and urban spaces.
Simultaneously the project introduces a new type of connection between Paris and its suburbs.
In the project, SLA creates a distinctive, green urban space directly on top of the Boulevard Peripherique – the big ring road that circles the whole of Paris. The two new mixed-use buildings and the 2,000 m2 central urban space are both constructed on a 5,000 m2 urban deck that makes it possible to rethink Paris’ relationship with its suburbs. The urban space is public and acts as a new pedestrian-friendly connection across the Boulevard Peripherique.
The project combines city nature-based ecosystem services with fully climate-adapted urban spaces and new social meeting places. At the lowest level you will find underground parking, above it pedestrian-friendly paths and, at the top, large roof terraces – which among other thing will house a tea plantation and a tea café.
SLA is also responsible for the green facades, the green roofs and the balcony gardens for the residential units.
In total, there are more than 200 different species of trees and plants in the project, all native to the Paris region. Besides creating varied aesthetic experiences and improving the microclimate, SLA’s planting design is composed to strengthen the biodiversity of the area and to create the right ecosystem services. Some of the important criteria here are how well the species perform in relation to absorbing rainwater and cleaning the air from pollutants.
In this way, SLA works with city nature and urban life as complete ecosystems and creates brand new urban experiences in an otherwise grey and traffic-congested part of Paris.
