The Bridge to Nowhere
Aggrandizing the vacated magasin's facade.
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In a city that wishes to remain horizontal and complete, the phenomena of urban voids creates an unwelcomed tension in the city of Paris. A desire to protect “postcard” views and a rejection of unintended incoherencies often result in attempt to “cover” the void – in a way that mimics what was once there. The protagonist of the proposal is the urban void of La Samaritaine, a famous French departmental store that is now vacated and torn down. By capitalizing on the uncertain future of the site – whereby the building permit of SANAA, the firm commissioned by LVMH for the departmental store, is revoked after the buildings were torn down, the project seeks to offset the liminal quality of the site through a temporal structure that will occupy the space for as long as it remains empty. In a city of continuous change that always seek to portray a fixed instant in time, the proposal draws upon the rich history of La Samaritaine to perform the opposite: by revealing the multiple instances of time that no longer exist or have yet to exist. Through the uncovering of the 5 “ghosts” of Samaritaine, I sought to resurrect them in a new series of void spaces that will re-solidify their place in history. Using my proposal as a primer that a city is not one fixed in time – despite Paris’ appearance of being one, the project reveals that a city is one that is in constant transformation, unveiled through the micro changes of the local skyline, under its appearance of coherency and continuity.
Aggrandizing the vacated magasin's facade.
Exploring how the most (view-)protected city can be further protected to reveal atypical monuments.
What do we insert in the gap made by a newly carved view cone?
A speculative idea that seeks to recycle the old using an urban block that has an upwards winding street to preserve what was doomed to be lost.
Revealing the ghosts of La Samaritaine, a french departmental store that has been left vacant since 2005.
An overlay of the 3 histories of the urban block.
Representing the ghosts of the past with skeletal rebar structures.
The first ghost - an urban facade that alternates between the haussmannian facade that no longer exists and the newly proposed SANAA facade that cannot yet be built.
A resurrection of the old art nouveau dome that was replaced in the 1920s.
