EUROPAN 9 - Genéve | camille Petit

Our challenge: respect the site paradoxes, ambivalences and strengths but at the same enhance the area and link it up to the city.

The site is both inside and outside the city – included but excluded – enclosed but neglected.
Contradictions can be at the core of singularity and many potentials of the area remained hidden must be enhanced :
- The incredible geographic situation at the meeting point between two very different rivers, between the calm and powerful Rhone and the wild Arve
- The presence of water everywhere
- The situation of an island middle in the city, isolated but potentially in front of the stage
- The beauty of the landscape industrialized but natural at the same time

Our challenge: respect the site paradoxes, ambivalences and strengths but at the same enhance the area and link it up to the city.
Our guidelines: adaptability, mobility, evolution and mix of uses, which underlie our whole project.
Our goal is to propose a new concept of public area, to rethink the possible links between private and public spaces. We’d like to encourage new forms of urbanity and new of interact with the city.

We create an “ interface” able to received many different uses and respectful of the context, and environment of the site.
The public space is adapted as a flexible layer which links up different evaluative modules.
Hence connections are also rebuilt up with the city, thanks to a retraining of the banks , by creating a new relation to water and new activities : to live on water, to go boating on water, to play with water, to play music on water …
We concentrate on new forms of ecological mobility to articulate influxes.
The identity of the site and some of its symbols must be preserved like the old fabric Kruger which is restored to have a second life as a cultural centre.