When cheeky Marcel Duchamp signed that urinal in 1917 for an exhibition in New York and called it art, he ushered the concept of the found object (objet trouvé) into the art lexicon (he called it a “readymade”). The architects of this summer’s Olympic Village in Paris did the same, virtually signing the Seine itself by grafting the river as an objet trouvé into their plan for the Athletes’ Village.
Appropriating the Seine helped the city win the 2024 Olympics, but conversely Paris was seeking to leverage the Olympics to transform a rust-belt dockland area into a mixed-use city for 12,000, featuring Paris’s greatest natural asset.
Parisian architect and master planner Dominique Perrault—slim, high-energy, salt-and-pepper, 70—originally explained and sold the project with a colorful cartoon: four ocean liners docked at the river, each representing a huge building. The Seine, which loops its majestic way through Paris and its outskirts, is the site’s great draw, as beautiful and evocative here as around Notre-Dame. But at Saint-Ouen and the two neighboring towns where the new Village is located, the river will be the wharf for four long blocks of buildings that finger their way from the river deeply into the Olympic Village site.
The plan transforms a former district of obsolete factories into a riverside neighborhood whose boulevards slope gently down toward the Seine, where people will be able to walk along quays at ground zero: water. In Paris’s 1900 games, swimmers competed in the Seine, and they are expected to do it this time as well. On Wednesday, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, actually plunged into the Seine with other French officials, celebrating its ecological cleanup and inaugurating its new swimmability.
Parisians take their Paris seriously, and for nearly two decades, they have been working on Greater Paris, looking outside its beltway to reshape and absorb underserved, socially isolated neighborhoods into a better integrated whole. The new 125-acre Olympic Village is a major down payment for “Greater Paris, ” an effort to engineer more égalité and fraternité into the city fabric.
The new Olympic Village lies on a five-mile-long tentacular line of desire reaching from core Paris out to Saint-Denis, where the royals of France, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are buried, and where the French National Archives are located—between a banlieue and the historically snooty capital.
The ocean-liner plan and the architecture are sensible and practical rather than spectacular. No photo-ready icons. No architectural petting zoo. No architectural triumphalism or Eiffel Tower 2.0. “Just a regular French neighborhood with everyday architecture, done in one shot,” said Perrault. “Not a utopia.”
Olympic history is littered with manifestos of good intentions, with stadiums abandoned or demolished after the Games (most recently in Rio and Athens) or venues that were either overbuilt (Montreal) or too ambitious to construct (Tokyo). Perrault, famous in France for his glassy, monumental National Library in Paris, finished in 1996 on the banks of the Seine, dared to choose modesty.
An effort to engineer more égalité and fraternité into the city fabric.
He had other goals, including making all the boulevards, streets, parks, and squares between the buildings livable and lively.
At a larger scale, Perrault designed two long boulevards linking the nearest Métro stop, Saint-Denis–Pleyel, to the water, establishing through lines—one landscaped, one densely built up with building corridors—between city and river. A third boulevard at the river widens into a plaza, a landscaped delta. The plan sets an example for a rapprochement between the river and a city whose architecture and urban plan have largely ignored it.
Perrault actually did not design any buildings in the Village but established guidelines for a team of 40 other architects who worked with contractors and developers in a public-private partnership. By one estimate, the cost of the project is approximately $4 billion.
The basic idea for the Village was to build a 24-7 city independent of a centralized Paris, not a bedroom suburb. “We worked for a reversibility between buildings that work as hotels during the Games and then become something else after,” says David Agudo, a project architect in the Perrault office.
All the buildings sit on a one-story podium intended for everything that makes street life granular in central Paris: cafés, gyms, schools, grocers, charcuteries, boulangeries, shops, épiceries, nurseries. Parking is tucked under the buildings.
In the context of what is being billed as the greenest Olympics ever, the master plan encouraged designing in wood, rather than steel or concrete, and using the Seine itself to transport and remove materials. Since the Seine is a wind corridor, the architects broke the ocean liners into individual blocks to channel breezes, and shifted and sized the blocks to maximize views and sunlight. “So whenever you are in your apartment or on your balcony, the other guy in front of you is shorter,” says Agudo. “The sun is touching you. You have a longer view.”
The language of the architecture is unapologetically modernist and virtuously restrained—no decoration, no sculptural form, no Parisian nostalgia, mostly grid. Acting like prows, the lead buildings along the riverfront break the right angle with balconies that bristle in all directions from basic building blocks turned at a 45-degree angle.
The Village’s grand architectural gesture is a wide esplanade sweeping across the front of the site, offering an overview of the Seine and Île-Saint-Denis. The long, wide plateau gives the project scale, a sense of a larger order, like the Champs de Mars around the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro Gardens, on the other side of the Seine.
This being France, there were overlapping layers of bureaucracy standing between the river and the new neighborhood. Just establishing a path from the site to the river required cutting through jurisdictional thickets. If the Village is architecturally cohesive, with a clear layout of streets accountable to the river, urban coherence required tact and strategy. The site actually straddles three municipalities, one on the political left, one on the right, and the third, Green. The better part of architectural diplomacy was achieved by keeping constituencies apart. “We managed to never see the towns together at the same table,” says Agudo, “not even once.”
The language of the architecture is unapologetically modernist.
Perrault found more than the Seine on the site. The vast Cité du Cinéma, represented by a fifth ocean liner, lies at the heart of the area, with working studios and a long, monumental arcaded passage that may eventually become Paris’s Cinecittà. The cast-iron building has the potential, hopes Perrault, of bringing moviegoing audiences and cinematic cool to the quarter, giving it a cultural identity, making the whole district a citywide destination.
After the Village converts into a town in 2025, the population will breathe life into two other found structures, a beautiful glass-and-cast-iron building that was once a market like Les Halles in central Paris, and a handsome electric generating plant, slated to host restaurants, auditoriums, and community functions.
But the ultimate objet trouvé is, surprisingly, the ground itself: Perrault razed the derelict factories, with their concrete floors and obsolete service roads, revealing the raw earth and natural contours of a landscape that gradually slopes to the river. The slopes, none greater than four percent, will accommodate the Paralympics after the Summer Games.
If there are no architectural fantasies here, there are the everyday pleasures of parks between buildings; long, tree-lined pedestrian promenades; rooftop gardens; a commanding esplanade overlooking the river; and eventually quays at the water’s edge.
The great achievement of the project will be a legacy city with the critical mass of some 2,800 housing units within 1.44 million square feet, for 6,000 residents and 6,000 workers, giving the spotty larger district an immovable urban anchor, a vote of confidence, and a sense of place. The design itself sets the corrective example of orienting the architecture and urbanism of the city to the Seine.
Some fear that gentrification will spike their rents. Others look forward to moving in. Optimists argue that an urban-renewal project like this is an engine of economic opportunity and growth that will de-stigmatize this marginalized, dismissed, traditionally immigrant district. The project includes 30 percent affordable housing, along with market-rate housing that itself costs considerably less than comparable apartments within the Périphérique ringing Paris. The legacy of the 2024 Olympics may well be a socially diverse oasis affordable, for example, to workers and young couples starting families.
The immediate goal of the project has been to deliver on-time housing for some 18,000 athletes and their associates this July and August. Then come 12,000 people in a new, mixed-use city with a fair share of affordable housing; an emphasis on river, earth, and landscape; and a new sense of neighborhood pride.
Beyond what the Olympics wants, it’s what the city needs: smart, sensible, equitable. Paris is playing the long game.
Joseph Giovannini is a New York–based architect and architecture critic. A 2024 New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, he is writing a biography of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. Rizzoli recently published his book Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde.
