Title: Skyline as a Competition
Log-line: Once it was cultural, horizontal or virtual, now it is indisputably vertical. It exists everywhere, any time, under different forms. Competition is a matter of perception.
Abstract: The project establishes a critical discourse about the universal competition of high rise as the most common trajectory of skylines on the 21st century, as an outcome of economic, political and aesthetical hidden forces and values. In contrary to the global vertical competition, Paris is known as a horizontal city frozen in time, which resists any change, while is being constrained by its own historical and cultural conditions. The project studies the Haussmannian reconstruction of the 19th and 20th centuries as the most fundamental Parisian urban changes and specifically the horizontality, which was explored through monumental avenues. In a first translation the city in generations would start self-erasing its fabric in order to create more monumental perspectives, while taking part differently in the international competition of “spectacles”. In a further translation, through the comprehension of the previous inadequate strategy, the project suggests an urban strategy which will allow the city development within is constraints, while in the same time create a spatial augmentation. In a balance between city growth and perceptual augmentation, Paris aims to expand through an authorized verticality, while taking advantage of its courtyards and enclosing them with inhabitable and deceptive domes. In a constant dialogue between perception and reality, the project explains itself through 3 different scales and views, the courtyard interior view, the street view and the view from above. In time, a landscape of variable ambiguous domes will start emerging and forming the new Parisian skyline, while being in an incessant discussion between illusionary and actual augmentation.
Perspective section of the site specific proposal at Place Edouard VII. The structure is consisted by two parts. An inner solid core, which has structural columns, a spiral circulation and platforms for programs and an outer adjustable inflatable skin. The inner structure is adjusted within the courtyard and is extending towards a specific height driven by different types of regulations. The outer form is attached by the roofs of the Haussmannian buildings.
The Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile how it is today and how it could become if Paris would continue an extreme Haussmannian strategy, while creating monumental perspectives.
Selected central area of the city, identifying the generations and the different types of avenues that the city would create in order to become a city of constant spectacles.
What if Paris is a city that reads differently from its interiors?
While considering the Haussmannian facade the most monumental part of the Parisian fabric that Paris needs to preserve and possibly built on top of it, the esquisse is proposing a transformation of the facade towards a space, that would read differently from alternative views. From straight underneath resembles a twisting dome, from a distance reads as a possible air structure and from any other view reveals its actual qualities and form.
Parametric investigation allowing us to create similar types of perceptions in different forms and vice versa.
Site specific intervention of an ambiguous dome, which suggests a space that combines a virtual verticality with a constant motion depending on different points of view of an observer.
Site specific intervention at Place Edouard VII. Spatial augmentation through the installation of a “deceptive ambiguous dome”, positioned on top of the Haussmannian buildings. The dome is consisted of two superimposed layers that are in close proximity and have an incremental slight angle variation. The animation is showing one possible outcome of an augmented space, resulted through technical studies and analysis in the field of Optics with specific research on Geometrical Optics and Visual Effects. The effect of the perceptual dome is proposing a space, which reads as being higher and in constant motion, always though in enduring correlation with the point of view and the speed of movement or the static position of the observer.
Can we maybe attempt to create a city of constant augmentation?
A spiral type of circulation, which creates an illusion of a higher space and in the same time does not allow the observer from the courtyard understand the continuation of the structure above.
Sequential images of Paris in the next decades, showing the strategy of the city growth taking form and transforming the Parisian Skyline.
