Over My Dead Body
A Prosthetic Exaltation
Urbanity
The space of the Champs-de-Mars escapes everyday appropriation, because it exceeds the human scale by proposing an environment of asphalt expanses, vehicular lanes and monumental buildings planted in the distance. The only landmark for the wandering body in search of activity is the subway station from which one emerges to lose oneself in the din of traffic, in the incessant flow of lights, in the activity whose scale and intensity overwhelm us. To requalify this place, to give it back its appeal to pedestrians, a reversal is necessary: that the machine's trench be given back to pedestrians, that the body take back its place in the city.
Semiology
But what is this body to which we must give back the right to govern? How do we perceive it, how do we materialize it? In an environment where everything is only flux and multiplicity, relations and communications, is the imagined body only a folded skin, a surface of inscription "incessantly traversed by [...] ephemeral experiences, giving place to artificially induced effects of life: tact and contact, sensation and vibration, touching and brushing, caressing and rubbing, cutaneous pleasure, brief satisfaction, fleeting enjoyment, flux and flow. 1" This meaning given to the body proposes new perceptive environments where the activity of a place is brought back to the human scale by the mediation of the skin. So how to inhabit this skin?
Tectonic
To make this skin an appropriable space, it is necessary to inhabit the folds and creases which will be built around an endoskeleton modulating their forms and movements. The project thus proposes structural axes to span and inhabit the trench, spaces of folded skin to live this meeting with the flows and energies of the site. Organized in a series of dilations and compressions of the skin space, the device modulates a progressive discovery of the trench and its qualities. Through this walk ultimately joining two isolated banks, one rediscovers a place of light, sound and movement. Through this space given back to the body, the experience and the perceptions are exalted: the noises reverberate on the surfaces, the light embraces the curved envelopes; all the energy is channeled there, perceived in flow and in vibrations. This space thus becomes one of unusual discoveries where energy is sublimated, celebrated.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The jury is sensitive to the relationship to the human body that animates the entire proposal. It calls for a new form of city and a new form of inhabiting the city. These hoses intended for pedestrian traffic are installed randomly above the trench. They are made of a skeleton and a flexible wall partially folded up, which alludes to skin. The need for an intimate relationship with the urban space, a response to the aggression of the city is evident. We appreciate the quality of the tunnel object and its human scale.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
10 scanned / 7 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Perspective
- Perspective
- Photomontage
- Photomontage
- Photograph
