STUDENTS OF VARNA FREE UNIVERSITY COMPETE FOR URBAN DEVELOPMENT OF THE TERRITORY OF AN OLD INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IN PARIS
31 January 2020
Fourth - year students of Architecture at Varna Free University “Chernorizets Hrabar” are competing in a prestigious international student competition for the urban development of a former industrial zone in the Paris Saint-Denis area. The students Presiyana Pencheva and Victoria Garnevska have joined the 16th edition of Sain Gobain's Multi Comfort 2020 and are developing their project under the guidance of their lecturer and mentor Assoc. Prof. Arch. Plamen Petrov, PhD.
The task of this year's edition of the competition is a real challenge for students. They must offer innovative, sustainable and energy-efficient solutions for converting the Coignet Enterprise post-industrial site in the Saint-Denis Paris area. The task involves the design of a green residential, educational and leisure area that combines the traces of historical heritage with contemporary needs for the sustainable development of the neighbourhood.
An interesting fact is that in the immediate vicinity is the national stadium Stade de France, which in 2024 will host the XXXIII Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. The lot intended for urban development is between the River Seine and the railways north of Paris. The history of the terrain is even more curious by the fact that it houses the first reinforced concrete building in Paris - the Maison de François Coignet, built in 1853 and declared a cultural monument in 1998. The house accommodated workers from the nearby workshops for the production of fertilizers, glue and gelatin. Francois Coagnier himself is a leading French industrialist, a pioneer in the application of reinforced concrete and an aide to the most famous French urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, known as Baron Haussmann - the architect who gave the present-day appearance of Paris.
The competition is held for 16th consecutive year and runs in two stages - national level, involving teams of students of architecture from Bulgarian universities. In the second, international stage, the winners of the national competitions will present their projects to an international jury at the City Hall of Saint-Denis. The students of architecture at VFU “Chernorizets Hrabar” have extensive experience in participating in the prestigious competition. In the 10th anniversary edition, the fifth-year students Valentina Petrova and Kaloyan Dimov won first place in the national stage of Multi Comfort with a project entitled “School of the Future”. In 2017, the students Polina Slavova and Angel Petrakov, then fourth-year students at VFU "Chernorizets Hrabar" presented Bulgaria in Madrid with the project "Multi-Comfort House".
The latest edition of the competition, in which future architects designed a house in Milan, involved over 2,200 students from 34 countries.
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