EPFL project awarded with the SIA Master of Architecture prize

In September 2023, the Fribourg School of Engineering and Architecture (HEIA-FR) hosted the exhibition of the 32 nominated projects, as well as the jury's deliberations, which took place on 14 and 15 September. The members of the jury were : Sandro Hauser, Pat Tanner, Véronique Favre, Claudio Meletta, Riccarda Guidotti, Daniel Niggli, Lilitt Bollinger, Marcia Akermann and Andreas Ruby.

Among the 8 award-winning projects, the EPFL laureate "Paris, Transit: last-mile food platform", by Marie-Ange Farrell and Manuel Rossi and supervised by Professor Eric Lapierre, brilliantly met the ambitious challenge of dealing with food, short distribution channels, circular economy and urban and social regeneration.

The awards ceremony took place on 16 November 2023 at Le Nouveau Monde in Fribourg.

Explanatory note from the jury

Marie-Ange Farrell and Manuel Rossi are renovating a former hypermarket and car park on the last kilometre of the Paris ring road, at Porte de la Villette. Like so many others, this ordinary architecture, designed for cars, is on the fringes. On the fringes of the city, at the gateway to the roads that lead to the suburbs and the countryside.

The project aims to take advantage of this in-between, interface situation to rethink the forgotten spaces of food storage and sales.

This urban interpretation of the interface enables the development of a circular economy and a concept of mobility: the food arrives from the fields by lorry and is stored in the building in large refrigerated rooms. It is then distributed by bicycle within a 10km radius (in order to decarbonise the last part of the delivery, which is the most polluting). At these points of sale, delivery staff collects any unsold food from the week's produce and takes it back to the solidarity canteen to ensure that everyone has access to quality food.

The building itself adopts a number of strong principles, it is a climatic architecture that raises the following question: How can we retain the benefits of modernity (more air, more light, more space - at lower cost and for everyone) at a time when our relationship with technology is under debate? The ingenious reuse of the heat generated by the fridges suggests a rationality and economy of means at the service of a specific climate. As for the canteen, it helps to create a social climate of mutual aid and sharing.

In addition to the booklet, which describes the building architecturally and suggests associations of ideas, the large board presents the richness of the reflection in a joyful and optimistic way. The students invite us to rethink the notion of 'context', which is no longer just spatial, but also environmental, social and economic. The grain of the city beneath the axonometry suggests the mechanisms at work: working to pay the rent. Having a flat, cooking, eating. Through this map, housing units and their inhabitants are revealed. In this way, the document weaves together the small and the large scale, inviting us to think about spatiality and the pooling of our production spaces in order to have an impact on individual living environments on a metropolitan scale.

Paris, Transit: Last-mile food platform

by Marie-Ange Farrell and Manuel Rossi

To the north of Porte de la Villette, a disused hypermarket and car park, commonly known as "the Mausoleum", is inserted transversely under the continuous belt formed by the ring road, between the city centre and the suburbs. This asymmetrical concrete monolith was built in 1967, at the same time as the ring-road viaduct, whose structure it incorporates into its open plateaus. Walled off and impenetrable since the eviction of its successive informal occupants, the building stands like a remnant associated with the car, awaiting demolition. Paris, Transit is taking over this inert structure by creating a last-mile logistics platform, a digestive machine capable of absorbing the flow of foodstuffs destined for sale and organising their carbon-free transport to the city's inner and outer suburbs. Along the way, unsold foodstuffs are re-routed within the building to supply a solidarity canteen. The existing open plan floors are pierced by a hopper into which three tiered storage units rise behind a screen façade on the scale of the ring road. The technical installations, like interior landscaping elements, feed these containers and the programmatic boxes that house the human activities. By means of movement and gravity, the food circulates through the building to reach the cycle trailers. This staging, visible right up to the façade, exposes the behind-the-scenes workings of food distribution, enabling this utilitarian programme to reconnect with the city.