“Promises of 2023” (3/12). Twelve artists to follow this year. Today, Clara Simay, Julia Turpin, Marine Kerboua, who place crafts and short circuits in the heart of their circular and united practice.
by Isabelle Regnier
There are three of them. Clara Simay, Julia Turpin and Marine Kerboua. Their agency is called eight. The first two created it in 2019 in the form of a cooperative production company after having won, with the Rail farm, the first call for projects “reinventing Paris”, which they delivered in 2021. They knew each other From the college, both had been passed through the Belleville school of architecture, had then worked for several years each for his side on small projects, on which they happened to collaborate.
The rail farm is located along the rails of the small belt, in the 19 e arrondissement of Paris, on a sloping plot. It is a social and united ecosystem, which brings together a restaurant, an agricultural greenhouse, a vegetable garden and housing for people in great precarious. We access it by a tunnel, which we barely notice from the street, which catapults you outside the Parisian grisery, in a secret enclave of wood and greenery. The people who live there also work on site and have the possibility, when they want, to eat for free in the restaurant, whose kitchen is supplied directly in the garden and in the greenhouse. It is a world apart, governed by rules that do not apply elsewhere – one of these places that Michel Foucault could have described as “heterotopia”.
The vegetable patch is between two wooden buildings, one of which brings together, on four levels, the accommodation, and the other, three different functions: the maintenance of the garden on the ground floor, the greenhouse At the top and, between the two, the restaurant that we join from the vegetable patch by a dry stone path. Large wooden tables arranged in crazy herbs along the rails act as a terrace. The interior is small but high ceiling, all in wood, isolated with straw, bright and warm. The harmony which reigns there has to do with the coherent and committed way whose project has been thought since the development of the program, with associations in the neighborhood, to the organization of the site, participative, passing by the choice Materials, all bio -based, and their supply of a very short circuit (30 kilometers maximum).
Political vision
This approach, that Clara Simay and her husband, the philosopher Philippe Simay, have recorded in a book with accents of manifesto (La Ferme du Rail. For an ecological and united city, Actes Sud, 208 pages, 20 euros), Valu on the Rail farm to appear in 2022 among the finalists of the Mies Van der Rohe Prize, which rewards the best European architecture each year. A huge spotlight for such a small agency, whose notoriety was previously more important in the field of social and solidarity economy than in that of architecture. He says all the importance of his positioning in the critical moment that we are experiencing, where architecture, even though his responsibility in climate change is no longer to be demonstrated, continues to be implemented in a regulatory system and insurance designed by industry, to serve its interests.
You have 60.27% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.