when Paris takes on the London accent

Along boulevard Morland, in the 4^e arrondissement of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, concrete arcades frame, like a cloister, an outpouring of perennials and tall trees. The place has charm. Visible from the street, barrels have been transformed into bar tables. Like an invitation to have a cool drink before venturing further. We are at La Félicité, a new urban block resulting from the first call for Reinventing Paris projects which has been gradually opening up to life since last June.

Above the arcades, a bar-restaurant open to the city deploys its large volume in a pseudo-Cuban atmosphere. The building, an elegant cobblestone in black metal and smoked glass which also houses a trendy youth hostel, forms the junction between the two wings of the former administrative city of Paris, an imposing stone work carried out by Albert Laprade (with Pierre Fournier and René Fontaine) between 1957 and 1966. For half a century, this H-shaped building, which housed the town planning department, stood alone on a large esplanade.

Multidisciplinary and international, the creative center of the group of companies that won the call for projects brought together the British architect David Chipperfieldthe French architectural firm CALQ, the landscape architect, also French, Michael Desvigne, and the Dane Olafur Eliasson, world star of contemporary art whose name stamps architectural projects like the logo of a luxury brand. The rehabilitation-transformation operation that they carried out led to closing the existing plot by filling in the missing edges of the H and at the same time opening it up to the city: an interior street pierced in the ground floors of the buildings now connects the Seine to Boulevard Morland and distributes traffic around three planted courtyards.

Social dimension of the project

The group itself was commissioned by an ad hoc company, the Société parisienne du nouveau arsenal (SPNA), whose capital is jointly held by the property developer Emerige, the billionaire (and individual shareholder of the World) Xavier Niel (via his holding company NJJ Immobilier), Bernard Arnault, and others.

The program, particularly dense, includes many housing units, offices, shops and services. It should take this Parisian artery out of the gentle lethargy in which it has slumbered since its creation in 1843, when Île Louviers – little sister of Île Saint-Louis and Île de la Cité – was attached to the right bank banks. The promoters insist on the social dimension of their project, whose housing is 75% social and intermediate, which includes a nursery and a bicycle repair workshop. They underline its environmental qualities (urban agriculture and solar panels on the roofs, integrated phyto-purification system, presence of a 100% organic covered market, etc.) and philanthropic (an art gallery devotes its programming to the presentation of galleries from South).

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