Submission: May 22, 2022
Registration: April 17, 2022
Language: English
Location: Euralille, France
Prizes: Please see details below
Type: 72H competition

The “Carpark Futures Competition” invites young architects under 40 years old, from all over the world, to think about the architectural, technical and environmental potential of a revaluation of underground car parks. How to transform underground parking spaces to fit contemporary societal evolutions? How can architecture respond to the challenges of future mobility and urban density?

Objective of the competition

While many urban centers rely on their presence in many ways, underground parking facilities have often been the forgotten part of architecture and urban planning. Historically, the introduction of underground car parks in dense urban centers from the 1970s onwards made it possible to integrate individual mobility into urban fabrics that predated the appearance of the car. The underground proved to be the preferred space to include huge surfaces for hosting this new technology of mass mobility. Today, underground parking lots are sometimes under-used and offer significant reserves of surface area, volume and property, whose potential is immense. It is now necessary to go beyond a vision of the underground car park as a simple inert storage space, in order to allow its integration into major metropolitan developments, by introducing new programs, new uses, and new architectural qualities. The idea of an underground real estate development, or “Sub-estate”, can now be considered as a strategy for an optimized, resilient urbanism, imagining the city as a system rooted in the ground.
The objective of the “Carpark Futures Competition” will be to consider the transformation of these underground infrastructures by proposing an architectural intervention in line with the new practices linked to mobility, urban logistics or the evolution of lifestyles and consumer habits.

Competition site

The « Carpark Futures Competition” will focus on a specific area of a vast district developed in the 1990s to realize the ambitions of a regional metropolis with European vocation: Euralille.
The city of Lille, in northern France, strategically located at the center of the European triangle formed by the cities of Brussels, London and Paris, was determined to seize the opportunity to become a major business and transportation hub with the imminent creation of its Lille-Europe TGV station. The designer of Euralille, Rem Koolhaas, has planned an international business center on some 120 hectares of former military land a few steps away from the historic center, extending to a European territory of 70 million inhabitants. On this huge area, 800’000 m2 of activities have been developed as well as a complex superposition of architectures and infrastructures, designed by many renowned architects: Jean Nouvel, OMA, Claude Vasconi, Christian de Portzamparc, etc.
At the heart of this area is the Euralille car park, study area for this competition.