eVolo Skyscraper Competition 2010

Paris requires 70,000 new housing spaces per year, yet the image of the city becoming extremely compact and elevated causes fear. All new ideas need time to make their way into people’s minds. Ideas called ”harebrained” soon become “interesting”, then “imaginable”, and perhaps one day “obvious”. The principle of densification, as an anti-urban sprawl solution, has been proposed for a number of areas of the city, most notably along the Seine, and consists of: building on roofs, relocating public facilities, increasing the use of compactness and elevation.

Like the majority of European capitals, the Paris of today is a city of human scale, a delimited space, traversable by bicycle and on foot. There are rapid systems of transportation, including trains, metros, and trams. Nevertheless, strolling, lingering, and wandering remain possible, interesting, and necessary experiences of Paris. It is true, Paris is currently reviewing its ambitions of “greatness”. However, within a country where speed is not necessarily a condition of efficiency, and where “quality of life” is elevated to “the art of living”, a purely geographic and territorial expansion based upon the American model is unfeasible. Strolling about, getting lost, dreaming, living and taking advantage of beautiful weather and beautiful spaces is essential to the inhabitants of Paris.