Future Comes Slowly

TEAM DATA

Team Representative: Bérengère Chauffeté (FR) – landscape architect
Associates: Augustin Bourgeois (FR), Camille Bourgeois (FR) – architects; Virginie Alexe (FR) – urbanist

Zillertalstrasse 57, 13187 Berlin (DE)
b.chauffete@gmail.com

See the complete listing of portraits here 
See the site page here 

B. Chauffeté, A. Bourgeois, C. Bourgeois & V. Alexe

INTERVIEW
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1. How did you form the team for the competition?

We live in different European countries: Europan was the opportunity to get back and work together.

2. How do you define the main issue of your project, and how did you answer on this session main topic: the place of productive activities within the city?

We chose to shuffle our focus from the question of productivity through the redifinition of this session issues. Our main interest was to imagine the future of the site, overwhelmed by rising waters, and to think of the landscapes and lifestyle implied by this environmental consequence. 

3. How did this issue and the questions raised by the site mutation meet?

As we spent time in Trelleborg, we detected details confirming the intuitions we had on the site. Things were already being put forward before arriving there: the big industrial buildings give an interesting space, pine forests at the edge of the city, a water stream and backfill hills. 

4. Have you treated this issue previously? What were the reference projects that inspired yours?

Thinking about the productivity of a particular site that will disappear in the future because of the rising waters was a first !

5. Urban-architectural projects like the ones in Europan can only be implemented together with the actors through a negotiated process and in time. How did you consider this issue in your project?

At first, we did not want to answer this question since it seemed too concrete compared to the work we accomplished with our project, which only refers to a dream. However, what we could say about our project is that, it is an not realisable - like every project of that kind - without the collective work of all the involved parties (decision-makers, inhabitants, architects, clients...) but we were precised enough in our project to specifically answer this question of implementation. 

6. Is it the first time you have been awarded a prize at Europan? How could this help you in your professional career?

It was the first time being awarded, and we are eager to do it again!