Since a few years, Paris suffers an excessive pollution caused by a transport system mostly devoted to cars. The city loses its inhabitants. Free and potential space no longer exists, while the city hall tries desperately to win back the one spaces dedicated to cars under pressure of Parisians. Paris is suffocating, Paris is mistaken, Paris is dying.
Meanwhile this fight is taking place, the city must find solutions to host its most vulnerable inhabitants, the residents of the places of detention while the public services dedicated are all going through deep crises. Inmates, homeless, refugees, retirees, psychiatric patients must be cured in the best possible conditions.
To save itself, the city of Paris must proceed to its own prospective archeology. Cars must be banned as well as the boulevard périphérique destroyed. Instead, a new building will be erected in order to allow a return of the nature in the city.
This radical building is the Galerie Bienvenue, abandoning deprivation of liberty. Built on thirty kilometers of variations, the building traces its origin back to the galleries and other Parisian buildings taken as references.
Vulnerable prisoners are offered the choice to integrate this alternative prison where they will be free. In exchange, they must also work and participate to the collective life. Likewise, Parisians do the same, therefore recreating the proper conditions for a social radical ecology in order to deliver the city of Paris.
Gabriel Chareton / Architect