Aeroville: Travel under One Roof

In October 2013, completed the construction of a multifunctional shopping and entertainment complex near the airport of Charles de Gaulle in Roissy (Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport), France. In 2010, Unibail- Rodamco appointed Philippe Chiambaretta/ PCA with the design and development of this complex called Aeroville. After less than four years of studies and construction, the project is open now.

The Paris area airport – Charles de Gaulle – has become the first airport hub in continental Europe because of its advanced technology, its flux of freight and travelers, and its inestimable potential for growth. This airport zone – consisting of 10 business parks, multiple commercial zones, and professional fairgrounds – is the first employment center in the Ile-de-France region, after La Défense, with over 120,000 employees. The Grand Paris projects (CDG Express or double loop) will soon reinforce the power of the “hub”, a node of global interconnection, and a threshold for the capital and the country.

This area has suffered from a lack of identity of space and centrality which could offer its users the facilities of a city center: services, shopping, entertainment, and culture. To overcome this absence, Aéroports de Paris, in partnership with the Unibail-Rodamco group have for a decade envisioned a long awaited mixed-use and entertainment complex at the fringes of the airport zone, less than 10 minutes by car or bus for employees of the area, and for travelers and residents of Roissy and Tremblay. Less than 30 minutes by car, there is a population of 1.8 million people that is affected by the project, between the highly dense zones towards Paris and the more scattered zones to the north.

IMAGINARY TRAVEL TOGETHER UNDER ONE ROOF
Aeroville, shopping and entertainment center, inspired by the imagination of the voyage will be the “city center” of the previously untraceable, vast zone. With fragmented blocks, it is an open space in which the airport inoculated its cosmopolitan dimension of travel and the city, this of flux and plural activity. The airport is the iconic space of a new migratory global culture. Transforming Aeroville into a metaphor of the journey there is a chance to join this global usability.

Full content of this issue you can read here

The full version of the article can be read in our printed issue, also you can subscribe to the web-version of the magazine

Materials provided by Philippe Chiambaretta / PCA
Images: Jean-Phileppe Mesguen