{"id":114843,"date":"2017-04-10T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/projects\/odile-decq-eschews-tradition-for-paris-incubator-le-cargo\/"},"modified":"2022-11-22T11:50:50","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T16:50:50","slug":"odile-decq-eschews-tradition-for-paris-incubator-le-cargo","status":"publish","type":"id_project","link":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/projects\/odile-decq-eschews-tradition-for-paris-incubator-le-cargo\/","title":{"rendered":"Odile Decq Eschews Tradition for Paris Incubator Le Cargo"},"content":{"rendered":"
Gazing up at<\/span> <\/span>the front of Le Cargo—with its black cladding, round windows, and bright red blob forms visible inside—it’s easy to forget that you are in Paris. This is not the picture-postcard central Arrondissements but the site of a <\/span>massive urban renewal project on the city’s postindustrial edge. And Studio Odile Decq<\/a>’s bold design for Le Cargo, which calls itself the biggest business incubator in Europe, symbolizes the municipal government’s ambition to make 21st-century Paris a capital of innovation. “I was immediately excited by the brief,” Odile Decq says. “Start-ups are young and creative, so I knew I could forget the notions of a normal office space.”<\/p>\n > Project Resources<\/a> Indeed, nothing about the scenario is traditional. It begins<\/span> back in 1970, when the French national railway opened a freight warehouse, the Entrepôt Macdonald, that instantly became the largest building in Paris: more than ¹⁄³ <\/span>mile <\/span>long, with 12 acres of floor space. As time went on, everything from impounded cars to paintings in the permanent collection of the Musée du Louvre was stored there. Despite the enormous size of the structure, however, it was always intended to be expanded, with the original three levels serving as a base for higher additions, and that is precisely what a public-private partnership, Paris Nord-Est<\/a>, eventually brought in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture<\/a> to coordinate. Under the master plan, Decq’s studio and other international firms have designed 23 individual structures, in varying shapes and colors, along the top of the onetime warehouse. A single building has thus given rise to an entire mixed-use neighborhood of office and apartment buildings, shopping, and public services such as day care and schools, all served by a tram line and a commuter rail station.<\/p>\n
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