SUMMARY
“JSI, je suis ici”, « HIA, Here I Am » is the title of our project
It is an urban project for the city of Hénin Carvin, that aims at enhancing and developing the image, activity and existing resources of this rich territory, giving its inhabitants the place they deserve. The title is also the name we gave to the central strategy, as the project entered its subject through the theme of the strategy.
JSI is an urban project strategy, contextual as well as material and experimental. It summons abstract notions: praxis, « process of putting theoretical knowledge into practice », tool of utopia; or hole, an even more abstract notion, a conceptual and experimental notion; an idea that connects cities or a poetic desire to touch a ghost. But it also aims at giving the city the most practical tools for a lasting development, because conscious of the city’s identity.
We choose to be present onsite and to get involved, in order to make the project exist, to get to know it. We go there. Once onsite, we walk the streets, climb the slag heap, have a picnic, take pictures and make drawings. At the end of the first day there, we get back to our car to find our 2 front tires flat. This misfortune worries us for a short while, but becomes the portal to the focal question of Hénin Carvin. This is Saturday evening, we are stuck in the city, forced to sleep in a hotel and to stay until Monday morning to get the tires fixed. During these three days, we meet Ursmar, Roger, Monsieur Bernard, Hakim, Bélo and others. Each of them welcomes us, tells us his story of the city, his story of the mines, his personal story today. For the Chronics of this trip with the people it meets, the project is taking shape in the present.
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The program revolves around 3 poles: the Panorama, the Third Twin and the Hole.
Panorama, the total show
The slag heap starts the program, the heap of tailings must be the primary resource, the deposit, the rich and charged hollow.
This resource is exploited through its characteristics.
The first one is its “materiality”. The sterile grounds are de-polluted, worked to build new roads. The extraction is done following the template of a full curb. This template can be applied to the other slag heaps. The panorama is hence smoothened. In a second stage, it is important to study, with the Lille University or following some Australian works on similar questions, the use of the heat produced by the self combustion of the organic residues to produce a heating energy for the housing to be build.
Micro activities : the Third Twin
The third twin refers to a typology found on the site: the twin houses. The third twin is an add-on to this typology. The intervention is based on the whole site, according to the project’s and site’s needs. Its role is to softly increase the construction density. Small-scale cells give the housing units the opportunity to grow. By aggregating or not, they can also welcome new activities directed toward public space, giving it an urban character calling for a walk.
Another paradigm of this functional cell is applied to the family gardens, taking the shape of small technical equipments.
This micro strategy is open to the new, undetermined, uses that the public space has the ability to invent.
The Hole
Like Louis Kahn, we ask the city what it wants, it answers that it wants light and people: warmth. In the park, one should be able to picture a crowd. Entrances to the park multiply, and the paths that irrigate from the city cross each other and draw a center. The work on the light expresses by some glasses pieces added to the de-polluted grounds, they sparkle.
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«EUROPAN's objective is to assist the young architects of Europe in developing their ideas and disseminating them on strategic sites proposed by municipalities or developers.» (Europan 8 charter).
The project clearly responds to the stated missions. If not subject to any condition of form, it stays subject to the ground rules of architecture. Its vocation is generous. It now needs to meet its counterparts to transpose its operational ambition of development. |