Paris : Place de la Défense

Project management
Gardens on slabs
Demands on circulation
Museum space
Events

Client :
Defacto

BASE (Team representative)
+ Explorations architecture
+ ON + Nadine Schütz
+ SOGETI

La Défense / Hauts-de-Seine
Budget / 10 M€
Surface area / 2,5 ha
Completion / 2019

Base won the competition to design the new Place de la Défense in March 2017. The square covers over 2.5 ha of public space at the very centre of Europe’s biggest business district.

Through the project we ask a series of questions : what is the nature of this platform which is traversed by over 20 000 people every week? What is it’s physiognomy? How did it evolve? This question takes the form of a garden, which consists of a delicate arrangement of museum pieces, plants, water features, lines, curves, surfaces and echos, visual and acoustic reflection. This garden reveals the ongoing urban theatre of the people that inhabit and cross this plaza.

We want to provide an organic and sensual dimension to the space, an environmental character and a sense of the gentleness found in a landscape.  It is not an urban or an architectural composition, but a stylized arrangement, incorporating the existing sculptures that were designed by Calder, Miro, Aillaud, Rie and O’Loughlin in what will become a vast contemporary, aquatic, acoustic, open, mineral, and welcoming garden.

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