Le jardin de la base de vie – rue Chevaleret- paris

photos : Yann Monel et wagon landscaping

The social housing complex on Rue Chevaleret is undergoing a major refurbishment led by architect François Brugel. At the base of the buildings, a large lawn—initially perceived as open ground—reveals its true nature following soil investigations: a former car park covered with approximately thirty centimetres of soil. This space is used to install the site compound for the duration of the works.

At the same time, the garden created by Wagon Landscaping for the Pavillon de l’Arsenal exhibition La beauté d’une ville is scheduled for dismantling. In agreement with the social housing provider Élogie-Siemp, architect François Brugel and the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, it is decided to fully reuse this exhibition garden and its hundreds of plants within the outdoor spaces of the Chevaleret housing estate.

Wagon Landscaping then designs and builds a new garden using recycled materials drawn both from the site compound and from the exhibition garden. Located within an area undergoing urban renewal, this temporary installation is conceived as an open-air nursery, intended to support and anticipate future landscape developments in the neighbourhood. Numerous young forest trees are planted with this long-term perspective in mind.

Desire lines observed on the site are made permanent through the reuse of existing paving slabs found and recovered on site, formalising everyday uses while minimising the introduction of new materials.

The garden is organised around four thematic “enclosures”: a biodiversity garden, an edible garden open to residents’ gardening activities, an ornamental planting garden, and a garden dedicated to plants suited to climate transition. The “base de vie” garden thus becomes an experimental, shared nursery space, demonstrating the potential of reuse and landscape prefiguration at the heart of an urban transformation

MOA Elogie Siemp, Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Moe architecturale François Brugel Conception et réalisation Wagon Landscaping