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Paris: Belleville & Menilmontant

Part 2 Project 2005
David Tompson
University of Cambridge | UK
Belleville is a relatively poor, densely populated district in eastern Paris. My project consists of a series of fragments that mediate between the local community and the larger development of a central urban block. These separate, yet related, fragments loosely define a public territory where interaction between the local population and visitors to Belleville is encouraged. The buildings are conceived as elements within an urban room defined by the backdrop of the existing facades that bound the site. Light and scale are manipulated to establish a hierarchy of both internal and external spaces between the street and the central space.


The project is part of a larger group proposal to create a central urban zone on the Rue Menilmontant in Paris. Its quality can be therefore assessed both on its own terms, and as a contribution to the overall result on the urban scale. A bold yet highly appropriate choice of program is handled via a sequence of spaces, each treated most skilfully in accordance with its purpose and highly imaginative coordination of scale, material and light. The resulting spaces are represented in a new type of three dimensional composite drawing, based on the combination of a model , drawing and digital representation.

2005
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