Italie 13
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Italie 13 (or Italie XIII) is the name of a large urbanism project in Paris which started in the 1960s and has been interrupted in the 1970s. Its purpose was to deeply modify the structure of some areas of the 13th arrondissement, mainly around the avenue d'Italie which has inspired its name. From this project, partially fulfilled, have been created numerous towers lying currently in the south of the arrondissement, especially Les Olympiades.
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[edit] Origins of the project
The project Italie 13 is one of the answers proposed by urbanists to a problem of insalubrity of some areas of the city, mainly the 13th arrondissement which was generally considered to be "badly built". Raymond Lopez, the architect advisor at the Paris city hall, and his assistant Michel Holley, considered that this renovation should be taken as an opportunity to completely reorganize those areas, in the spirit of the Athens charter and Le Corbusier. This meant that new construction should be tall in order to liberate more space at the ground level and bringing a better luminosity to apartments ; and separating axes supposed to bear important traffic from smaller ones supposed to only serve local areas and pedestrian courses. Other principles from Le Corbusier, such as surrounding towers with parks were, however, put aside.
The guiding plan of urbanism (Plan d'urbanisme directeur) written in 1959 and applied in 1961 summarizes in few words that new conception of the city: "urban layout should not be defined anymore by streets, but actually by built-up structures, which should themselves be guided by functionnal considerations". The Olympiades district is a perfect ilustration of this program.
Thanks to the support of a strong political power which had followed the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the Italie 13 project started quickly. The city council approved it in 1966 and charged the private sector to complete it. The project operated on a territory of 87 hectares between place d'Italie, avenue de Choisy and Paris's outlying boulevards. Its ambition was to build 16,400 accommodations, and 150,000 m² of commercial and business space. It also included the construction of new schools and gardens.
Towers were supposed to approximately share all the same height, about 30 floors. Holley felt that towers should respect the principle of height unity in respect of Parisian traditions.
[edit] Ambivalent results
Main achievements of Italie 13 are spread in three main areas of which have to be added scattered isolated buildings.
[edit] Les Olympiades
The Olympiades project, directly managed by Michel Holley from 1969 to 1974, is the only project with the Front de Seine district (located in the 15th arrondissement) to fully respect the objectives of the guiding plan of urbanism:
- towers and groundscrapers are displayed along an approximative North-South axis independtly of street layout.
- some streets, exclusively dedicated to functional use, are invisible as they are built under the huge elevated esplanade built in the middle of the district.
- The esplanade is exclusively dedicated to the pedestrians, while the surrounding avenues concentrate all the car traffic. Shops are built on the esplanade where are also located the main entrances of towers.
Towers of the district are named after cities which had hosted the Olympic Games: Athènes (Athens), Sapporo, Helsinki, Tokyo and others.
Nowadays, the district, bearing a costly maintenance, is part of a new project of renovation in the frame of a grand projet de renouvellement urbaine (large project of urban renewal).
[edit] Nearby place d'Italie
The project was planning to enlarge the avenue d'Italie to the dimensions of the Champs-Elysées in order to be changed into an expressway. Pedestrians and local traffic was supposed to cross the avenue with bridges and tunnels. This part of the project has finally been abandoned.
Nearby place d'Italie, Michel Holley has drawn the tower Antoine et Cléopâtre, one of the few which doesn't have the shape of a strict parallelepiped.
On the other side of the avenue, four towers and one groundscrapers named after precious or semi-precious stones (Onyx, Beryl, Jade, Rubis) have been erected around a private garden built on the roof of the Italie II shopping malls (itself formerly known as Galaxie). An esplanade was supposed to cover the Avenue d'Italie, something which has finally been abandoned. It is one of the rare spots where the Avenue d'Italie has been enlarged to 70 meters, as planned by the Italie 13 project.
The most ambitious part of the project was the tour Apogée: of a similar tower as the Tour Montparnasse, it was supposed to be the landmark indicating the entrance of the district. Proposed with different design by Michel Holley during the 1970s, its height has successively decreased before finally the cancellation of its construction. In 1980, the French government had to pay 470 millions of francs to the promoter as a compensation for this cancellation.
[edit] The Masséna district
This distric is built on the former location of Panhard factories between Porte d'Ivry and the rue Gandon. It encompasses form East to West:
- Villa d'Este, where the concentration of towers is undoubtedly the highest inside the city of Paris (hence excluding La Défense.
- The shopping mall of Masséna 13.
- The district of the Porte de Choisy.
Towers in that district are directly displayed at the street level and as such are better integrated in the Paris urban layout. They are named after Italian cities or composers: Puccini, Palerme, Rimini...
[edit] Other constructions
We must add to this list some isolated buildings and projects:
- near Porte d'Italie: the Tour Super-Italie, the only cylindrical tower in the district, and the tour Chambord built on the boulevard Kellermann.
- On the boulevard Vincent Auriol: several scattered highrise buildings including the three towers of Cheops, 'Chephren and Mykerinos, named this way as their shape is slightly pyramidal, and one of the mmost original tower in Paris: The Tour du Nouveau-Monde, which is decorated with bas-reliefs on all its height.
[edit] The end of Italie 13 and the return to a more traditional conception of the city
As the towers were being successively erected, the reaction of the public grew increasingly harsh, a view which was later shared by professionals and politicians. In 1974, the new French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, decided to stop the Italie 13 project.
It is difficult to deny that the brutalist design of those towers, formerly seen as a decisive progress, did not help to promote the general image of the 13th arrondissement, especially that, as being built on a hill, they are more visible than other projects such as the Front de Seine towers. The bland aspect of those towers have massively damaged the image of towers in general among Parisians. Inhabitants of the towers are themselves more ambivalent. Their judgement depends widely on the building they live in. Indeed, while the exterior aspect of those towers is very similar, their equipments and their general standing vary massively between one and another. The high maintenance costs of such structures, particularly in regard to the social categories willing to live in the neighbourhood and in what is the absolute opposite of the individual house (still the dream of many in Paris, and the sure sign of social success), has discouraged many from buying appartments in the towers. Nevertheless, the Olympiades esplanade has kept a rather important business and commercial activity, something which is not true in other projects in Paris and its suburbs. The arrival of the Asian community in the end of the 1970s has brought an important and growing life in this area.
Because of the critical welcome of this project, urbanism in France, and especially in the city of Paris, has followed a much more modest direction. The Paris Rive Gauche project, located a few hundred meters from the Olympiades, is the only large-scale project of urbanism inside the city of Paris since Italie 13. It must be said though that the 87 km² of the city, excluding outlying woods, does not offer much space which has not been built-up yet. The Paris Rive Gauche project consists of a much more traditional urbanism based on the alignment of mid-rise buildings along the street layout. While urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s was based in the idea to turn back to the past, the urbanism of nowadays is based on the idea of promoting Paris heritage. This philosophy is less held in the Paris inner suburbs, where large-scale projects of urbanism, usually business, have multiplied since the 1990s.
[edit] See also
[edit] Internal links
[edit] Bibliography
- (French) Paris contemporain, Simon Texier, Parigramme (2005)
- (French) Les Olympiades (Insecula)
