Ilot des Avelines
In a contemporary metropolitan city, the market is a bit like the village square. It’s a weekly rendez-vous that builds the little rituals of everyday life. It’s a weekly meeting that builds the little rituals of everyday life, habits that are of little importance but which, as time goes by, become part of our lives and the lives of our families and friends.
Behind, the market building plays with codes to ensure that its function is clearly identifiable by residents of the town and neighbouring municipalities. The aim of the project was to create a place where the residents of Saint-Cloud would like to go on Saturday mornings, even if they didn’t have any shopping to do.
With the aim of linking the various existing facilities (the Aveline museum and garden, the Conservatoire, the Médiathèque and the rue Gounod) through a coherent history, a reinvented covered market and a series of public spaces qualifying each urban situation, our proposal was not restricted to the boundaries of the plot. The scope of our thinking went beyond these boundaries to bring together the potential that is there, but which is not being exploited to its full potential.
The new covered market, with its outdoor spaces, ‘La place du Marché’, along the Boulevard de la République, ‘La place des Avelines’, at the junction of the Rue des Avelines and the Rue Joséphine to the east, and ‘La place des Délices’, on a balcony overlooking the Jardin des Avelines to the west, separated by a difference in level of almost 2.30 m.
The founding act of the project was to obliterate the topography by working on a system in several sequences:
- the greengrocer’s market, with inclined walkways (in compliance with PRM regulations) that gently descend 1.50 m to reach the level of the slab beneath the existing housing building.
- The food hall: At this height, the floor of the market becomes horizontal again, with continuity with the two lower plazas. The main facade overlooking the square opens wide thanks to thick oak doors on pivots. Inside, the structure of octagonal posts supports a ribbed concrete tree structure that organises the building’s paths and clearly arranges the various functions. Natural light enters the building through the large glazed spandrels and the grid of glass cylinders pierced in the central panels of the vast green roof.
