Atelier Architecture and Urbanism

ITINERARY

Winners of Europan 4 competition, “Constructing the city upon the city”, in 1996 on the Den Haag site (NL), Marjolijn Boudry and Pierre Boudry created the Atelier in May of the same year.
Both of them are architects and urban planners, graduated of the Saint-Luc Higher Institute of Architecture in Belgium, and their careers and collaboration reflect a continuous and consistent commitment to architectural research. For each project, this research identifies and proposes an essential balance between the cultural world, the artificial world and the environment..
The result is a flexibility and mobility in the components of the project, for greater sensitivity to the project requirements, and a technical ability to manage the solution in a way that transforms the components into genuine interactive objects. Everyone is a participant and interacts with their surroundings.
The projects, which vary from the small-scale to large scale projects with diversified programmes, reflect and inculcate relativity, a return to sources and openness of mind. They cover the following spheres: architecture, urban planning, regional development, space planning, scenographic design, interior design, design, architectural and urban programming.

COMPRESSION/DENSIFICATION

Compact programming, interaction of uses, protection of the environment and future development.

Mandres-Les-Roses (F) - An educational hube

The architectural method adopted for the construction of collège and the sports facilities is essentially to establish landscape continuities throughout the plot, and to structure the whole programme and its requirements in relation to the interactivity that the amenities need to maintain their dialogue with the environment.
The project retains traces of the agricultural legacy of the site: network of long, narrow plots, the existing range of plant life. It focuses on horizontality in order to emphasise the flat relief, and the perception of an open and tranquil landscape.

FLUIDITY

Staging of flows, movements, transitions.

Orly (F) - Urban Delta

The urban Delta project proposes an interactive urban programme to enable the town to grow in movement and in space.
The Hub is a point of interconnection between flows, mobilities, housing platforms and the amenities of the Hub itself.
The programmatic Ring is a transition space which unifies, filters, orders and structures all the flows. It reconciles the urban, the industrial and the natural, by making it possible to identify appropriate and diversified programmes to match each situation.

INTERFACE

Interface between landscape and living spaces.

Obernai (F) - Ecological neighbourhood

As part of the town’s pursuit of sustainable development, the project is based around platforms: an economic platform, which generates new traffic flows, is the tram infrastructure linking Strasbourg to Obernai ; an ecological platform, which is the new urban facade at the entrance to the town, driven by the momentum of the programme. The park runs diagonally across the plot and accommodates the public programmes. It is a unifying point with a large number of dwellings opening onto it.

EQUILIBRIUM

Emotion/volume/échelle/fraction

Romainvilliers (F) - School complex

School complex needs to convey a strong neighbourhood identity and be visible from the road across the planned new urban park. Its two main facades and general dimensions have a significant visual impact on the neighbourhood’s image. It resembles a school under the roofs, which are a combination of horizontal lines, echoing the flatness of the ground, and oblique panels. Like houses within the house, the programme’s different parts are structured across different scales. In colour, the tone of the whole structure is a warm brown and orange and contrasts with the dark background of the green surrounding spaces.

Europan Generation, The reinterpreted city Catalogue
Editions: Cité de l’architecture and Europan, May 2007
224 colour pages, bilingual English/French


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