BIG to design Europa City

 Groupe Auchan chooses BIG to design EuropaCity an urban landscape hybrid of culture leisure and retail carved into the landscape of the Triangle de Gonesse.

Project Info

Client: Groupe Auchan
Collaborators: Base, Transsolar, Tess, Transitec
Size: 80 Ha
Location: Paris, FR
Partner in charge: Bjarke Ingels, Andreas Klok Pedersen
Project leader: Joao Albuquerque, Gabrielle Nadeau
Team: Maren Allen, David Tao, Salvador Palanca, Marcos Bano, Lucian Racovitan, Ryohei Koike, Camille Crépin, Elisa Wienecke, Léna Rigal, Paolo Venturella, Tiina Liis Juuti, Jeff Mikolajewski.
How to combine a dense city with an open landscape ?
“Europa City will offer, on an unprecedented scale, a mix of retail, culture and leisure around a defining theme: Europe, its diversity, its urban experiences and its cultures. Rather than orienting Europa City towards the highway, we propose to integrate it as the natural center of a new business district. We propose an urban form that combines dense city with open landscape, exploring the urban and green potentials of the site at once. We propose a commercial city that becomes a gathering point for the surrounding neighborhoods– a new kind of commercial center that is blended into the urban texture, and includes rather than excludes the surrounding city. The programs of Europa City are organized along an internal boulevard with a mix of retail, entertainment and cultural programs on both sides. The boulevard forms a continuous loop travelling through six different areas themed as the various regions of Europe. The central boulevard becomes the Rambla, the Regent Street and the Champs-Élysées of Europa city. Along the boulevard, public bicycles and electric public transport bring visitors quickly around. The circular street creates at the same time surprising spatial experiences and a clear overview – It allows you to get lost, and still find your way.”
“The site is exceptionally well connected: locally as a main node on the Grand Paris Express Metro, regionally as entrance gate to the metropolitan area of Ile de France and internationally with its direct connection to the second largest airport in Europe. We propose to integrate the new facility in the surrounding business district as an urban form that combines dense city with open landscape, exploring the urban and green potentials of the site at once.”
“We propose to arrange the programmes according to energy and resource use, in order to maximise utilisation of waste products within a closed urban ecosystem. Waste heat is channelled from cooling plants into recreation facilities as swimming pools and spas. Waste water is re-used as irrigation for the parks, and urban scale recycling facilities minimise overall waste production. The five regions of Europe have a different ways of harvesting renewable energy, from solar power to wind and geothermal energy. EuropaCity becomes a laboratory for sustainable technologies, and a showcase for viable green tech implementations that does not only save energy, but also improves the quality of the urban environment.” – BIG

Info and images © BIG

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