Streets of Delémont
Author(s)
NP2F
François Chas (FR), Fabrice Long (FR), Nicolas Guérin (FR), Paul Maître Devallon (FR)
Cleint(s)
City of Delémont
Competition team
François Chas (FR)
Fabrice Long (FR)
Paul Maître Devallon (FR)
Nicolas Guérin (FR)
architects
Europan 9 Delémont
runner-up
2007
The special style of Switzerland vernacular architecture that is also performance oriented is conducive to the creation of unusual areas confronting the daily home life with common ideals, the softness of a certain Swiss lifestyle with a certain idea of the city. Combining closeness and remoteness, community and individualism, scarcity and banality.
A street network creating various spatialities connects, reveals and is laid over housing and retail blocks. There are numerous street styles and still, they are unified in their ability to create a coherent, unique and recognizable landscape.
2008-…
After the competition, the office was committed to affine the project and draw a new composition of the "special plan" of the district.
The densification of the Delemont’s site bumps into land's problems. Delémont's city is negotiating the buying back of the district for now on suitable for urban development; after the heavy construction work of the strengthening of the bank alongside the site.
In this new study, the team develops his concept of streets that link the housing blocks and enter inside them, allowing public and shared spaces, a promenade in the residential block itself.
This project is connected to the following themes
Mobility - Interface
The proposal develops the concept of the street in the air, with the public space continuing inside the collective building blocks, offering a continuous promenade up to the rooftops, which connects the large scale of the landscape with the more intimate scale of the apartments.
Shared spaces - Link - promenade
The project restores the traditional nature of the street and, by combining it with the buildings, exploits its quality as a shared space.