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Grand Paris

MVRDV

A Greater Paris by MVRDV


Created in collaboration with ACS and AAF, "Paris Plus petit" is a project by MVRDV vision, one of the ten international architecture and urbanism proposals presented for Greater Paris 2030 to the Economic and Social Council of France, to envision the future of the French capital and its vast agglomeration, an urban challenge commissioned by Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France.

More ambition, more optimism, more density, more efficiency, more ecology and more compactness: those are the key words for MVRDV's vision, a combination of responsibility and ambition to continue its development, to ensure its consistency and to develop a cohesion that can build a base for a collective enterprise to solve its problems, to enlarge its presence and attractiveness, to create an even more remarkable, exemplary city.

The video moves around the concept of the "grandeur": what does a city need, today, to be a great(er) one? Become a smaller! This is the paradoxical vision by MVRDV: Pari(s)Plus Petit. Through the use of infographics, animation and models, the video addresses the main topics the city will face, such as the rise of the urban population and the scarcity of space: the city needs to be more compact, more dense. Or, for example, the video lists all the developments the city will need to provide in the next future, in terms of more housing complex, more infrastructures etc, and its solutions, such as more buried infrastructures that would liberate the space for more housing programs.
"The sum of all projects can avoid future sprawl and radically transform Paris into one of the densest, most compact and therefore sustainable high quality cities in the world: Paris Plus petit" says MVRDV in the press release for the program.

Leaving the content aside for a moment, what is notable here is the use of animation in order to convey a vision: using only two colours (light blue and white), Paris is represented as a model, which can be transformed, reshaped, rethought; the fluidity of the images, the use of a digital music, abstract as much as the city, the use of a simple text without a voice over, makes this a perfect example of a video to be used in a presentation and, what's crucial, that confirm the vision brought by MVRDV.

(Story by Sara Marzullo, The Architecture Player)

Credits

Architect: MVRDV
Mentioned project: Grand Paris (2008)
Project location: Greater Paris, France
Research: MVRDV, ACS and AAF
Script: MVRDV
Animation: Wieland&Gouwens

Netherlands 2009
Duration: 6'26"