Emmanuel Caille is fascinated by an island in the Loire that had once been used by the shipbuilding industry and afterwards forgotten for decades. Thanks to an intelligent master plan, the island has become a vital counterpart to the downtown of Nantes on the other bank of the river.

The Île de Nantes is situated in the Loire estuary facing the downtown of Nantes. During the last decade this island of almost 337 hectares has become the site of an urban renewal project that may very well be precedent-setting for forthcoming projects. Here, the familiar thought and action patterns of architects, city and landscape planning seem to have been reversed. Specialist horizons one has to struggle with otherwise simply seem to have dissolved into thin air due to the dynamics of the process.

After the shipyards’ closure in 1987, Nantes was confronted with a vast area of industrial wasteland that is, moreover, cut off from the inner city by a branch of the Loire. Instead of pulling down the derelict industrial ruins the commissioned architects Alexandre Chemetoff and Patrick Henry opted for another strategy – they understood this pocket of land as a fragmentary and partly obliterated historical narrative and decided to take it up. Their concept was built on the idea to carry on this urban renewal project step by step taking the neighbourhood’s inherent qualities as starting points. This open approach organizationally outlined in a “plan guide” Chemetoff once characterized as a “sum of vivid experience; a procedure in which the project is invented in the course of its implementation, while it is being implanted in the public space.” That public space – understood as the linking element of all the planned measures – thus became the determining factor of the process. A driving force of similar impact for the urban renewal project proved to be the tangible reality of establishing a direct reference to the already existing elements – the very “building blocks” of the story to be told. Brickwork, railway tracks, crane systems, warehouses, vegetated and sealed surfaces have been reused without passing a judgement on their aesthetic value in order to design a city of the future.

The measures taken in the Atelier de l‘île de Nantes framework were splitted in the following individual projects: the restructuring of the Quai François Mitterrand and the neighbourhood surrounding Jean Nouvel’s new palace of justice (2005); the “Square de l’île Mabon” where the vegetation has been allowed to take over the concrete jungle of the former industrial premises (2005); the “Parc des chantiers” as the new use of the warehouses and banana hangars (2005); the “Nefs de la Loire”, a simple rehabilitation of old industrial halls as roofed cultural venues (2007); the restructuring of the Boulevard Général de Gaulle with the priority being given to sustainable mobility (2007); and the area surrounding the shopping centre including the Boulevard Blancho and the river banks (2007).

All these interventions could only be implemented thanks to the “new preliminarity” procedure developed here – which is based on an ongoing interplay of reminiscences, experience, and innovation; of stocktaking, intervention in situ, and evaluating criticism. Without question, a decisive factor for realizing the project has also been the clear political backing by the city and her building authority.

Exceptional in their depth of engagement with site, quality of design and exquisite detail, both these projects share an understanding of architecture – landscape, urban or otherwise – as a kind of inspired ethnography, an ongoing process of translation through inhabitation.

Fakten
Architekten Alexandre Chemetoff, Paris

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aus Bauwelt 43.2010
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