☉ Open Farm is an academic project by Lucas Monnereau developed in 2017. It is located in Aulnay-sous-Bois France in an industrial setting. Its scale is medium with a surface of 7.000 sqm. Key materials are polycarbonate and wood.
Context
The extended analysis of the territory clearly reveals an organization of impermeable programmatic zones that are adjacent but not overlapping.
We see agricultural land surrounded by commercial and industrial zones, and then towns (Aulnay-sous-bois, Gonesse, etc.) in the second ring. The ZI and ZA are therefore boundaries that need to be rethought. The PSA wasteland is the first opportunity on this territory to start an agricultural re-conquest aimed at re-linking cities and farmland.
We are not «wiping the slate clean» of the past, but we are «deal with» a past (industrial wasteland) and a future (urbanization plan).
The goal here is to come up with a resilient project aimed at laying the first stone of a transition for the fallow site of PSA Aulnay, thus creating a new link between city and agriculture. A sort of Trojan horse project formalizing a strong gesture of encounter between place of life and place of production The objective is to re-interest and re-include citizens in a close relationship between city and farmland through a hybrid program that allows farmers and citizens to find each other. This requires an architectural reinforcement of the agricultural equipment.
Indeed, farm programming must be varied and hybrid in order to awaken new interest among city dwellers.
Program
This multimodal farm project, in addition to the storage, stalling and agricultural processing spaces, becomes a training space for consumption mediation, a place to live for the urban dwellers of Aulnay-Sous-Bois.
The project is part of the urban plan designed by Richez et Associés. Nevertheless, this urban project is only planned for 2025. The open farm project can therefore be built upstream.
The intervention then takes place in a scenario of the “meantime” not waiting for urban projects but taking advantage of the complexity and length of their implementation to activate the regeneration and transition of a fallow site in order to generate new practices between urbans and farmers.
Project
The project is set up in the heart of PSA Aulnay’s industrial brownfield. It is the interface between the arrival of food from the Triangle de Gonesse on the one hand and the housing and offices area to come from the Val Francia project by Richez and Associates on the other.
This interface is characterized in the operation of the building itself since one side of the building is reserved for the handling of goods with a technical area of unloading dock. The other side of the building acts more like a covered public street.
Material
The project is designed with locally produced bio-sourced materials. On our project site two large halls are dismantled and thus offer a resource for direct reuse on the project site. Thus, almost all the non bio-sourced materials of the project come from in-situ reuse.