Storage
The organization of social groups is structured around human activities, many of which are based on the ability to store. The function of storage refers, moreover, to the fundamental role of architecture, which aims to define the form of shelters of all kinds and all scales that protect us and our activities. Whether it is food, throughout their chain of production and exchange; energy sources or energy in various forms, from strategic stocks on the scale of a country or a continent, to that of a household; memory and information, in libraries, museums or data centers; manufactured objects in logistics facilities or recycling centers, we live among places of storage and our lives depend on it.
In traditional pre-industrial societies, probably more conscious than ours of their vital character, these types of places were often the object of a strong architectural and expressive investment. They were monuments, whether by their dimensions or by the capacity of the buildings that defined them to create a powerful image. In the contemporary capitalist world, the places of storage, in particular of goods, whose production and trade play a central economic and social role, are, more often than not, reduced to simple boxes without expression, which only incidentally indicate their function, and only maintain a relationship of predation with the territories they occupy. The same is now true of most storage places. We wish to go beyond this unspoken aspect of the architecture of capitalism and to critically investigate the question of the image and the monument in the context of the environmental crisis and the scarcity of resources.
A line between center and periphery: monumentality vs. monumentality
The project sites are located on the straight line between the Garnier Opera House and the La Fayette and Printemps department stores in Clichy-sous-Bois, that is, along the route of Rue La Fayette and Avenue Jean-Jaurès in Paris, and their radial extension in the northern periphery of the city. From the bourgeois and commercial districts of the center to one of the most enclaved and poorest districts of the Greater Paris, we will explore a series of very varied territorial, urban and social conditions in the heart of one of the largest European metropolises.
Center vs. periphery: we will examine the question of the monument, which will be at the center of our concerns, by trying to restore the image and the architectural, symbolic and urban status that belong to the storage places, to these two different parts of the city.
Each project group designed a project in the center and one in the periphery in parallel, dedicated to the storage of identical elements (water, information, energy, etc.), in order to explore an interweaving of issues raised by these themes and by their location in two specific types of urban forms. Beforehand, four models of remarkable storage projects have been made, as three possible ancestors of expressive utilitarian architectures: the Royal Library by Etienne-Louis Boullée; the Montsouris water storage tank by Eugène Belgrand; the Mobilier National by Auguste Perret; and the Very Big Library by OMA-Rem Koolhaas.