Bath-Hotel
TEAM: Mehdi Allani, Camille Lot – Ecole d’architecture de la ville et des territoires à Marne-la-Vallée
We propose Bath Hotel which brokes the continuous sequence architecture/neighborhood/city : the hotel as an urban structure with a metropolitan scale and in relationship with the surrounding landscape. It consist of a 8 storey high, 35 kilometer long building developed at the exact location of the boulevard Périphérique in Paris. The Hotel reinforce the insular nature of the capital, the physical limit of the ring road is considerated as a quality that we must maintain. Several successive city walls surrounded Paris, this fundamental characteristic was upheld in the 60’s when the Periphérique was built on the former site of the Thiers wall, the last remaining of the city walls of Paris. As a controlled-access ring road, it constitutes a enclose universe with its proper ‘portes’, a beautiful praise to separation. Hotel’s footprint variate from 25 to 35 meter large, taking advantage of the extraordinary orogra- phy of the existing infrastructure. The hotel act as a framing sys- tem, a generator of available space in which each storey is a singular strip. The ground oor is a mall, giving a generic space which connect both intra and extra muros. The Périphérique is absorbed at the rst storey. Unaltered, it conserves is qualities as a communication route and can be used as drop-off for tourists or businessman coming from airports or highways. One storey is reserved to equipements including playgrounds, movie theaters, restaurants, exhibitions spaces, sports equipements and urban farms. Some facilities are reserved for Bath Hotel’s clients and others are public. Now tourists can play tennis with Parisians and experiment a new form of travelling. There are three storey re- served for the Hotel itself, they consist of a succession of typi- cal Haussmannian en lades. One storey provides full exibility, each strip is a new universe separated by curtains : a dormi- tory, a shared bathroom, a camping, a tatami room. The archi- tecture becomes both a didactic act and instrument of collective integration. The cell, since it is consumable, must be replaced every time individual needs change whenever new needs are created by the renewal of models and standards. An other storey is a classic hotel with 25m2 rooms alternating shared space and 8 private rooms. On 7th oor, a four-star palace offers 100m2 rooms with private gardens and amazing views. The rooftop is essentiel : a canal offer a new communication link that multiplies the possibility to go from one place to an other in the city. Water provides a incredible potential to Bath Hotel. The canal is a new monument both for tourists and parisians where you can enjoy water activities or just have a drink above the roofs of Paris.