At the northern part of Paris, down to the Seine river, a brand new village was built to welcome 14,500 athletes. After the Games, this 51 hectares should became a landmark in the suburbs while embodying a new way of thinking architecture and public spaces. PARIS 2024 was a big opportunity for France to demonstrate that worldwide temporary events could be sustainable and can offer more than souvenirs as legacy. That is why CONCEPTO imagined a pioneer project establishing the future standards of outdoor lighting design. To this end, we worked on our 3 mains spearhead topics : biodiversity preservation, reuse and social inclusivity.
We first worked with local inhabitants and ecologists in order to understand the Saint-Denis nights and thus create its dark infrastructure. So we started from darkness to define the lighting masterplan and thus respect both nature needs as well as human nights uses. We then can give recommendations about light settings and temporalities. The result of this way of working are peaceful night atmospheres where we can rediscover the shadows and develop a nocturnal imagination.
Lighting installations were thought as a continuity to create welcoming and intimate spaces were it would be pleasant to gather everyone. We wanted inclusive spaces with atmospheres would immediately give a feeling of security.
To do so, people have to play the major role in the use of public space. We worked with landscape and furniture designers to invite users to dream, to play, to be active but above all to appropriate themselves the site. We then use alternatives to traditional public lanterns in favour of suspended, integrated lights or more scenographic lights. Among them, there is gobo projectors which invited you to walk “In the Athletes steps”. To remind the past of the site and create a giant nocturnal playground we drawn footprints spreading along the main avenue of the district. All these projections are echoing the “Olympic Ring” where 878 lighting dots are creating dynamic events every daily nights. Their amount represent the number of PARIS 2024 olymic & paralympic competitions and their color temperature are close to the Olympic flame shades.
When you are walking on this ramp, which is symbolizing the inclusivity of this Games, you are appreciating how a global lighting project can be consistent when everything was designed at the same time and at different scale. With this kind of approach we were able to conceptualize sustainable nights from the global approach of the dark infrastructure to the lighting furnitures themselves. To reduce the project’s carbon footprint, we chose wood and 100% reused steel poles. So CONCEPTO created a range made of refurbished furnitures and scaffoldings while opening a new way of doing lighting design.
