The conversion of the Macdonald warehouse in Paris is one such project, and in a certain sense it combines the worst and the best of a twenty-first-century metropolis.
It is an elongated warehouse in the northern 19th arrondissement: a huge building, completed in 1970, 617 metres long, with a floor area of 5.5 hectares and surrounded by railway lines and motorways. After the turn of the century, this construction, for thirty years the most important distribution centre in Paris, was sold and redeveloped, via a public-private partnership, to create housing, offices and shops. As has become customary in the West — and certainly in a France traumatised by grands ensembles — this building, the size of an urban district, would be replaced by the maximum possible number of wildly differing blocks of flats.
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) won the design competition, and Floris Alkemade and XDGA took over the project. They proposed retaining the uniformity of the shed, a flat concrete rectangle with loading bays and a uniform first floor, by adding two identical layers. So much simplicity, so little individualist complexity, came up against huge opposition. The shed was the only thing to be retained more or less in its entirety, but even then the French administration went its own way and — driven by a marriage of politicians and property developers — invited another ten firms to do their own thing, albeit within certain limits. The result is a brutal clash of architectural traditions, and t Section hus also of worldviews and convictions: the calm and lucid dullness of the shed is now the plinth upon which the multiformity of contemporary architecture is given free rein.
