A Kind of Space
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Les Olympiades In the 1950s Paris started the GPRU (Grand Projet de Renovation Urbaine) which included 35 high rise apartment buildings. The project became the biggest urban renewal since Haussmann. Les Olympiades, situated in the largest Chinatown of Europe, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, became the most successful part. It was meant to connect Les Olympiades, with its fifteen planned towers, all named after Olympic cities, with train station Les Gobelins. Therefore, the urban planning of the area existed of a Le Corbusier-like solution: three (semi) subterranean levels for transportation (one for storage, one for the brand new train station and one for a parking lot), a level for labor and several levels for living, which was realized in high rise apartment buildings. The presence of the train station was the decisive factor for the urban composition. In 1970 it started with the construction of the platforms and in 1973 the first tower was delivered. In the end, two of the fifteen towers were never built, because of expropriation problems. Therefore, the top platform was never finished and left in a devastated state for over 40 years. After the departure of the last train from train station Les Gobelins in 1992, two basement levels of Les Olympiades were transformed into the logistics department of the Asian commerce.3 The model reveals the scale of the surroundings. The space is guided by striation4; the buildings, the green-
View from the Rue de Tolbiac, when arriving on the upper level of Les Olympiades, Paris, France [photo: Annemiek Osinga]
Annemiek Osinga
ery, even the street lights and the facades, everything is outlined. The corridor flats seem to bend over, while the high rise apartment buildings disappear into the sky. This has a certain effect on the visitor. When arriving on the upper level of Les Olympiades, coming from the Rue de Tolbiac, you feel very small compared to the surroundings, but as soon as you reach the zigzagged pavilions you start to grow.
3 Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Connaissance des Arts: Les Olympiades Paris XIIIe, Une ModernitÊ Contemporaine (Parijs: Groupe Les Échos, 2013) 4 French philosopher Gilles Deleuze defined striated space as the regulated space, which is homogeneous and where the relation between two objects is always univocal.
The graduation studio A Kind of Space consists of twelve students: Fieke van den Beuken, Jorg de Bie, Thijs Frijters, Aukje Goossens, Iris van Huijstee, Murat Imamoglu, Ben Kleukers, Sam de Koning, Tess Landsman, Annemiek Osinga, Josefien van Soest and Lieselotte de Vrught.
Interpretional model of the upper level op Les Olympiades [photo: Ben Kleukers]