Dominique Perrault

Dominique Perrault envisions six blocks perpendicular to the waterway, akin to colossal ships anchored by the Seine. The exhibition, with mirrors symbolizing the water’s reflective surface, showcases a design method in a riverside development project that promotes airflow and broadens water channels and successfully reconnects the river to the city center.

 

The Athletes’ Village, primed for the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, encompasses neighborhoods such as Ile Saint-Denis, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Etienne-sur-Seine, all of which directly face the Seine. This village is crafted with six blocks, designated as ‘Island Boats’. This layout evocatively paints the image of “six islands in the Seine”, silhouetted against the urban horizon.

 

Fashioned to be slender yet elongated, the blocks lean towards the river, inviting its refreshing aura while fostering natural air corridors. The architectural design prioritizes vast green expanses and incorporates a central open space offering panoramic river vistas, thereby ensuring unobstructed views even from deep within each block. Additionally, with half of the entire athletes’ village earmarked as public areas, the compound exudes an airy, communal ambiance.

 

- Praemium Imperiale award laureate, Dominique Perrault gained international recognition with the French National Library (1995). This project marked the starting point of many other commissions abroad, such as The Velodrome and Olympic swimming pool of Berlin (1999), the extensions of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg (2008/2019), the campus of Ewha’s University in Seoul (2008), 뭉 the Fukoku Tower in Osaka, Japan (2010). The studio has also carried out various heritage conversion projects, such as the redevelopment of the Pavillon Dufour at the Chateau de Versailles (2016), the transformation of the Poste du Louvre in Paris (2021) or the refurbishment of Metal 57 in Boulogne-Billancourt (2022). Dominique Perrault sees architecture as a discipline intrinsically linked to urban planning, he has worked on the urban future of the Ile de la Cite in Paris and developed the Olympic and Paralympic Athletes Village for the Paris 2024 Games.