This master-planning project focuses on the reinvigoration of a dwindling industrial site in the north of Paris into an active production hub and multi-purpose zone of confluence for existing industry workers, new residents, and the surrounding community.
The site—CAP-18—is located on the edge of the 18th and 19th arrondissement. The current buildings create an opaque boundary that obstructs pedestrian flow from city to suburb. In response to these conditions, this master plan calls for a strategic demolition of peripheral buildings to open the site up, while maintaining the five core buildings on-site for renovation, and the addition of two new buildings to address the surrounding context.
The new master plan striates CAP-18 into three distinct bands—public, industry, and residential—punctuated by nodes of unique programmatic landmarks like an auditorium, open market-place, and meeting rooms, to draw in diverse inhabitants.
To the north, a new public building interfaces with the elevated street front and acts as the billboard for CAP 18. Behind it, the existing building is retrofitted with a landscaped ramp that connects the Chapelle Charbon park below to the upper street level and nearby transportation hubs. Visitors traversing this ramp are flanked on either side by community amenities, including sports facilities, a food hall, bike repair shop, and urban farming in the unconditioned upper floor. The goal for this structure was to alter it as minimally as possible, treating it delicately, only intervening at strategic moments to enable conditioning and circulation, highlighting the park as an active agent in the life of the building.
At the heart of the site, a habitable roofscape sits above the remaining industrial buildings, creating a fifth facade visible from above while creating an additional level of workspace, densifying the industrial program below. These renovated buildings are served by a new, condensed infrastructure tunnel carved from the infill under the existing service road, freeing up the upper-ground-plane for pedestrians and outdoor work-spaces. Meanwhile, the interiors are divided into multiple bays for lease, which are accessed via the edges of each building along the thickened glazed facade, which provides direct view into the industrial workspaces. Finally, the addition of a cross-grid roof structure level on the top of each building creates a unique lighting and spatial condition to house the new neo-handicraft industry programs and communal spaces currently missing in CAP 18.
To the south, a thin, dense bar of mass timber housing creates a new urban front along the main road, Rue de l’Evangile, acting as a porous boundary that negotiates between the industry life behind and the city beyond. The ground floor is left open for pedestrians, shops, and shared amenities; while the upper levels and roof contain communal outdoor terraces for the residents. The housing units themselves are composed of three different unit types: a single height unit, and two different double height units, allowing for a diverse range of inhabitants from differing income levels, backgrounds, and kinship structures.
This redesign of CAP-18 examines a key question of how to improve the quality and visibility of industrial spaces for workers within an urban fabric. This could provide a spatial solution that supports production within the city, and at the same time creates new spaces for affordable housing, public amenities, newly reemerging industries, and rail infrastructures connecting the site and city at large. By using structural adjacencies and pocket interventions, a maximal amount of the existing buildings and concrete structures are preserved for reuse. Breathing room is left for further reinterpretations, re-adaptations, aging and growth of the site that will inevitably come as materials weather, surroundings adapt, and programmatic needs change over time.
