Avignon gare TGV

Avignon, France

Avignon gare TGV

Avignon, France

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The high speed TGV Méditerranée line's train station in Avignon is found in an outlying city area undergoing complete transformations, and whose forms, as a consequence, have been significantly affected by traces of their agricultural past. Our task consisted in recognizing, ordering, and classifying, the many landscape elements, eliminating some while transforming others, all in accordance with the new necessities that have arisen, in order to create in the end a kind of language. From the peri-urban jumble of the Rhône Valley, we unearthed windbreak hedges, orchards, and plane trees. We sought to measure and echo the proportions relative to each of these elements. The immense parking lots are, for example, treated like orchards, orchards of another scale and type, but divided up in such a way as to be inscribed within the horticultural traces. Beyond the plot limits, the parking lots and train station buildings are given a geographical anchorage that evoke and revive and reactivate the countryside in return. Aesthetically, a game of substitution takes place: everything remains where it is, yet each thing changes. Rather than composition in the classical sense, there is an integration of the existing patterns through a transformation of these patterns; rather than importing exotic models, indigenous elements are transposed.    

  

 

data
Year:
1994 to 2002
Status:
Built
Program:
Territories, Equipments
Client:

SNCF, RFF

Project Team:

MDP Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, with Christine Dalnoky
SNCF Gares & Connexions
AREP 

Area:

30 ha (74,1 acres)

  • 2002 – Benedictus award
    2001 - Brunel Award