Seguin Island, located in the heart of an exceptional collection of parks and gardens, is part of the Seine river landscape. Its surface area, of modest dimensions with respect to the large neighboring parks, designates it as an urban public space. When industry occupied the island, it was often compared to a gigantic ship. Its beauty was linked directly to its scale, to a certain sense of “excessiveness”. The foundation and artifice of this former construction serve as the basis for the site's character and its quality. We believe the forms and varieties of the site's future public spaces should derive principally from this foundation.

We deciphered, superimposed, and crisscrossed the numerous tracings of the island's foundations, in order to transpose even the material of the foundation base itself. This graphic process of observation translated the image of the landscape into a mosaic of surfaces, both mineral and planted, with a stratum of trees whose pointillist arrangement allows the different densities of the underground structure to be visible on the surface.

The status of the future public spaces will be an intermediate one, between square and garden. Large concrete slabs are separated at distances that allow gardens to be created in the hollows between them. They include the pathways and functional surfaces, and allow for a broad range of uses and a flexibility in setting up numerous programs.

The hollowed out gardens are somewhat hidden spaces, access to which is controlled and determined. The forms in which they are planted derive from contrasting sources: a constructed artifice juxtaposed with materials evoking nature. 

The architecture of these public spaces responds to what came before, conserving the memory of the island's construction and its multiple transformations.