Lyon "Defense"

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

In the 1960s, Lyon decided to create a new center - in addition to the old one. Despite the deep disappointment of the creators of the complex with the result, this project took place from both urban planning and architectural points of view.

The idea to build a new business center in Lyon originated in the mid-1920s, but the resources were then only enough to hold an architectural competition. They returned to it only 30 years later, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, when the city elected a new mayor, Louis Pradel, an active and reform-minded person. Unlike his predecessor Edouard Herriot, who "ruled" the city for half a century, but combined the position of mayor with key posts in the French government, Pradel was an exclusively local politician working for the benefit of Lyon alone.

The change of the municipal administration took place against the background of a deep political crisis in the country, which ended with the coming to power of General de Gaulle. The establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958 had a serious impact on the territorial planning system of France, which received an impetus in development and was significantly strengthened. In the early 1960s, the government began to pursue a policy of decentralization, which by 1965 crystallized into a program of creating "metropolises (ie agglomerations) of equilibrium" designed to balance and improve the country's settlement system. Many key powers, traditionally concentrated in the capital, were planned to be delegated to places in the eight largest cities of France (Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, Lille, Nancy and Lyon), which were to become the nuclei of these "balances". For each of them, it was necessary to develop the so-called. Plan of arrangement and organizational structure (Plan d'aménagement et d'organisation générale, abbreviated as PADOG) and create a new center capable of serving adjacent departments and cities. Thus, the initially “local” idea moved to the national level.

In the 1960s, the city-wide center of Lyon occupied the middle part of the Peninsula - the territory of the historical core between the rivers Saone and Rhone. As studies have shown, this was completely insufficient, given the prospect of turning the city into a regional center serving adjacent territories and large cities (Grenoble, Saint-Etienne, Bourg-en-Bresse and Annecy), which implied the placement of administrative functions of a supra-municipal rank there. The key intention of that time was to avoid systematic travel to the capital to resolve administrative issues. The historical part of the city was not suitable for these functions: there was not enough space, moreover, offices were scattered throughout the territory and poorly connected. Life confirmed the conclusions of the planners: the central (trade and business) functions gradually moved to the eastern bank of the Rhone, spreading further inland. The solution of the issue through a total reconstruction of the historical center was not considered in principle - at the time of the development of the project, such methods were already considered unacceptable even in cities damaged during the war years (and Lyon was not among them). In 1962–64, the country, not without the influence of the powerful Minister of Culture, André Malraux, underwent a change in the urban planning paradigm, which shifted the emphasis from reconstruction to preservation of heritage.

Instead, various peripheral territories were worked out to accommodate the new center, and the most preferable was the southern end of the Peninsula - the Confluence area. However, this idea, supported by the mayor, had to be abandoned: it would have been necessary to move the prison to a new location (and there were no people willing to accept it), besides, the new center would have to coexist with the newly built wholesale food market. Next in line was Part-Dieu, an area on the east bank of the Rhone.

Swamp with potential

In those years, the area was a typical middle zone: not the outskirts, but not the center either. True, the left bank of the Rhone began to be seriously developed back in the 19th century, and to the north of the future complex the prestigious Brotto district grew up, adjacent to the Tete d'Or park. However, the main territory remained a backwater: it was occupied by small-scale industries adjacent to cheap, low-quality housing. Historically, it was a swamp, although it was drained, but it retained this quality in an urban sense because of the railway, which ran from north to south, isolating the left bank from the eastern communes. On the periphery of this territory in the middle of the 19th century, a military town was built - low barracks around a huge parade ground. It was in their place that the Lyons "city" was subsequently erected.

The reconstruction of the area began long before the birth of the Par-Dieu project. In 1948–49, then-mayor Herriot decided to renovate the poor quarter of Rambaud. Rambeau made the career debut of the young urban architect Charles Delfante, who would later play a key role in the creation of the Part-Dieu complex.

The design process dragged on, and during this time institutional changes took place in the city: in 1957, the Society for the Logistics of the Department of Rhone and the City of Lyon (SERL) was created, which took over the functions of the developer. The company brought in new architects: Jacques Perrin-Fayolle, Jean Sillan and Jean Zumbrunnen, who, together with Delfant, formed the backbone of the design team for the future city.

The project, presented in 1958, involved the construction of a "grand ensemble". a complex of several multi-storey residential "slabs", supplemented by social infrastructure facilities. Reconstruction of the area started from the Moncey-Nord neighborhoods, where two residential "plates", a school and a small shopping center were erected on the site of the Rambeau houses according to the design of Siyan and Tsumbrunnen and in accordance with the tenets of the Athenian Charter. Almost simultaneously, they were supplemented by two more houses of this type in the southern part of Part-Dieu.

Great expectations

However, literally a few years later, at the beginning of the 1960s, the scale of design expanded dramatically - the idea of creating a new city center in Part-Dieu appeared. This leads to a significant expansion of the site to 22 hectares and a serious reworking of the project, which is already in the process of implementation.

For France in the early sixties, such tasks were new. La Defense in Paris and Mériadec in Bordeaux had just begun to build, but there were no other samples. Due to the paucity of their own experience, foreign ones were actively studied, especially examples of the creation of new urban centers and business districts. Delegations of experts, which included high profile officials and business representatives, visited several European countries (Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany). Were analyzed projects for the reconstruction of Coventry and Birmingham (English cities, very badly damaged by the bombing), the Barbican quarter in London, Leinbahn in Rotterdam (the first pedestrian street in Europe), as well as new business centers in West Germany (Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart and Hamburg) and Italy (Milan, Turin, Bologna and Rome).

The functional Par-Dieu program was based on four pillars: offices, trade, culture and an administrative complex, complemented by existing and new housing. The anchors of the project were to be an administrative complex with representative office buildings, as well as a large shopping center. Another key element was the creation of a powerful cultural complex: Lyon experienced a shortage of cultural institutions, moreover, everyone was worried about the problem of the extinction of the "city" at night. The case helped partly: the municipality of Villeurband, which in those years was not part of Lyon, refused to build a palace of culture, initiated by André Malraux. The mayor of Lyon seized the initiative, proposing to build it in Part-Dieu and based on the winning project of Paul Shemetov and his AUA colleagues. It was assumed that it would be a huge complex, a real city of culture in the best traditions of the interwar avant-garde - with a theater, a philharmonic society, a cinema, an exhibition gallery, a library and other functions, with a universal hall. All these elements, including housing, were planned to be combined completely with a pedestrian space at ground level.

At the same time, at an early stage of the design, the idea of a powerful vertical dominant, proposed by Delfant, arose. The first real skyscraper in Lyon was to become a spatial landmark, marking the new center and clearly visible not only from the Old Town, but also from distant points - for example, from the new Satolas airport. The 165-meter post-modern Tour Part-Dieu tower, nicknamed the "pencil" for its shape, was built in 1972-1977 by the American architect Araldo Cossutta and his French partner Stéphane du Château. Set in the middle of a vast flat area, for several decades it was one of the most important elements of the urban landscape and a symbol of Lyon in the twentieth century. Only recently, the construction of new skyscrapers adjacent to the tower has changed the silhouette of the city, devaluing its role in it.

International experience has shown that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, new urban centers are being built next to or in conjunction with railway stations. It was logical to use a similar approach in Lyon, where a marshalling yard was located next to Part-Dieu. Delfant and his colleagues proposed to build a new main station on the site of the station, while the old one, Perrache, should be made auxiliary. The idea was appreciated by Mayor Pradel: without a modern train station, Lyon would have been impossible to compete with other regional centers. In addition, the city received practically two new planning axes: the existing latitudinal axis was extended far to the east, and the historical meridional - along the Peninsula stretched from north to south - was duplicated on the eastern bank of the Rhone along the Garibaldi street, connecting in the future the Tete d'Or park in the north with the fort Lamotte in the south.

Dreams and reality

However, the project, approved in 1967, was not destined to come true. The first to "fall" was the station. The idea of its construction did not find support from the management of SNCF (French Railways), which refused to take on part of the costs of replacing the marshalling yard with a passenger one. The shortsightedness of the railroad monopoly dealt a powerful blow to the original concept, rebounding the architecture of individual buildings.

The second knockdown was the change in the course of state policy for the development of "metropolises of equilibrium" in the 1970s. From now on, the main emphasis was placed on the development of the Ile-de-France region - i.e. the central functions were transferred from Paris not to provincial cities, but to its periphery - primarily to La Defense and other areas of the metropolitan agglomeration. Funding for regional projects has been significantly cut.

In those years, the non-production sector of the Lyon economy (both public and private) was rather weak, and did not have time to recover from the pre-war level. This was partly due to the conservatism and passivity of the chamber of commerce: for example, it slowed down the creation of a new international airport, which was immediately taken advantage of by Geneva, Lyon's neighbor and rival. The mayor's office had to independently find funds to complete the Par-Dieu project, choosing between the introduction of new taxes and the attraction of private investors on conditions that were unfavorable for the city. First of all, this led to the "swelling" of the shopping center due to less profitable functions: from the originally planned 30 thousand m2 to 120 thousand m2 (ie 4 times). Its typology has also changed. On the 1967 plan, it looked open, urban in nature: the parallel streets Bonnel and Servian, leading to the river, were planned to be built with arcades, as in medieval cities. Instead, a monstrous shopping mall was built with a corresponding multi-level parking and blank facades, which occupied not just a third of the entire territory, but its center. Typically, such structures are located in the suburbs of the motorways and very rarely inside the city, at least by the late 1960s in Europe, this practice was already considered perverse.

Success or failure?

The main losers were cultural functions. Instead of a huge complex, only a concert hall and a library were built, moreover, in the form of separate, unconnected buildings. The auditorium (Maurice Ravel Concert Hall) was designed by Delfant himself in collaboration with the Parisian Henri Pottier, and the library by Jacques Perrin-Fayol and Robert Levasseur. Both of these structures are worthy examples of sixties brutalism, in the first case - sculptural, and in the second - structural. These are not the only ones, but perhaps the most interesting from an artistic point of view, the Par-Dieu objects, which somewhat sweetened the bitterness from the curtailment of the ambitious program.

State bodies also contributed to the partial degradation of the project, which had to move to a specially designated administrative complex [cité administrative], but not all of them decided to leave their homes in the Old City. The City Hall turned out to be more responsible in this regard and transferred most of its services to a new building (architect René Gimbert, Jacques Vergely, 1976)

Ironically, just a few years after its refusal, SNCF itself was forced to initiate the construction of the Par-Dieu station: the high-speed TGV railway line was supposed to arrive in Lyon, and during its design it turned out that the Perrache station was not adapted for these purposes. Too late - the integrity and coherence of the original project could not be restored.

In 1973, a competition was held for the design of the new station, in which Charles Delfant also took part, who took René Gagès, André Remondet and Claude Paran to his company. Since the new station was supposed to be a through station, they proposed a solution in the form of a megastructure that “saddles” the tracks and provides uninterrupted connections between old city blocks and peripheral areas east of the railroad. We can say that the project of Delfant and his colleagues anticipated the spatial scheme of another railway station - at the airport of Saint-Exupéry (Satolase), built according to the project of Santiago Calatrava. The less spectacular project of architects Eugène Gachon and Jean-Louis Girodet was realized. Although the station received a much more traditional, postmodern solution, it integrated quite organically into the "body" of the city, thanks to the closed square in front of it, which isolated it from the noisy highway, later turned into a boulevard.

Part of the responsibility for the Part-Dieu problems lay with the transport engineers, who promoted the idea of massive construction of highways to service the new district and its huge shopping center. 1970s - the time of mass motorization, not bypassed by any major French city, including Lyon. The transformation of the urban structure in the interests of road traffic was actively supported by Georges Pompidou, an ardent champion of modernist doctrines. However, this fundamentally contradicted the original ideas of the project, which assumed the priority of pedestrians and public transport. Since the technologies of the time did not allow the construction of multi-level parking lots in water-saturated soils, this led to another distortion of the original Par-Dieu concept and the appearance of a pedestrian platform raised above the ground, similar to the esplanade of La Défense. The platform, the most spectacular in itself, nevertheless, created many obvious problems: it turned out that its parts, “washing” blind facades, do not work as urban spaces, attracting only marginalized people. The same effect is observed at ground level - near stairs and even amphitheaters.

Under the influence of all these various factors, the project not only changed radically, but also lost its original controllability. Investors who decided to participate in the construction began to pull the blanket over themselves. The buildings were designed based on the current market conditions, the green spaces were significantly reduced in size. The technical conditions and regulations were not respected, which led to a strong distortion of the overall design and endangered the functional and artistic integrity of the complex. The authors were bitterly disappointed with the final results. Delfant himself, who later wrote a book about the history of the project, called it "Par-Dieu: the success of one failure" ("La Part-Dieu, le succès d'un échec").

And yet, despite the obvious discrepancies between expectations and reality, not everyone shares the pessimism of the creators of the project. Part-Dieu took over many of the administrative, business and commercial functions and thus helped to put in order the historical center of the city. In addition, an impressive ensemble of original modernist architecture appeared in Lyon, which formed a new "face" of one of the oldest cities in France.

In 2010, a new stage in the development of the district began. According to these plans, in the next 15 years, Par-Dieu will undergo a deep modernization and will be almost completely renovated. We hope to devote a separate review to this project, which is being implemented in accordance with the concept of AUC architects, familiar to us from the competition for Greater Moscow.

The author expresses his heartfelt gratitude to the architect Tatiana Kiseleva, employee of the AUA Paul Chemetov bureau, for her assistance and the provided archival materials.