Italie 13
1960 urban project in Paris, France
Italie 13 (or Italie XIII) is the name of a large urbanism project in Paris which started in the 1960s and was interrupted in the 1970s. Its purpose was to profoundly modify the structure of some areas of the 13th arrondissement, mainly around the Avenue d'Italie which inspired its name. The partially completed project led to the creation of numerous towers in the south of the arrondissement, notably Les Olympiades.
Origins of the project
The Italie 13 project was one of the answers proposed by urbanists to the insalubrity of some areas of the city, mainly the 13th arrondissement which was generally considered to be "badly built." Raymond Lopez, the advising architect at the Paris city hall, and his assistant Michel Holley, considered this renovation to be an opportunity to completely reorganize those areas, in the spirit of the Athens charter and Le Corbusier. This meant that new construction should be tall in order to liberate more space at the ground level and to bring a better luminosity to apartments, and separating heavily traveled roads from smaller local roads and pedestrian areas. Other principles from Le Corbusier, such as surrounding towers with parks were, however, put aside.
The guiding plan of urbanism ("Plan d'urbanisme directeur") written in 1959 and applied in 1961, concisely summarizes that new conception of the city: "urban layout should not be defined anymore by streets, but actually by built-up structures, which should themselves be guided by functional considerations". The Olympiades district is a perfect illustration of this program.
Thanks to strong political support following the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the Italie 13 project began quickly. The city council approved it in 1966 and charged the private sector with completing it.
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This entry incorporates text from “Italie 13” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.