Observation

Throughout its history, the slab that is La Défense has undergone many changes not controlled as a whole. The physical boundaries of this slab dissolved in the local circumstances of the site, its fringes a substratum with a multitude of solutions and local authorities, have gradually fragmented.

The result is the abrupt juxtaposition of the heavy infrastructure needed to support the business district with the urban fabric of the suburbs of Paris creating a modernization scrap.

Integration

The urban oppositional logics implemented in the selected site have fragmented the space in built areas that are surrounded by non-permeable infrastructural borders.

The brief by l'Etablissement Public d'Aménagement de La Défense (EPAD) to make its previously impenetrable limits accessible, to organize the site into urban space in a hierarchy of a succession of lines and squares, highlighted the need to consider and qualify an area of fringe, an outcome which previously had not been the subject of the project.