HOTEL DIEU

Hôtel-Dieu is above all a hospital, the oldest in Paris. Formerly a social charity, we were talking about a hospice. The Latin origin of these terms refers us to the dimension of hospitality. Hospes means both "the receiver" and "the one who is received". The suffix -arius (-ier in French) means "who gives". The term hosts shares the same root. Hospital is then synonymous with welcoming. From then on, the Hôtel Dieu is about to find the city within it. The city in the diversity of its users, from the traveler to the researchers, from the student to the entrepreneur.

Over the centuries, the island of the City has hosted all the diversity and complexities that make the city. Today it is composed above all of the emblematic institutions of Paris including the Hôtel Dieu. For us, this consultation must be an opportunity for regeneration of the island through public space, programming and architecture.

Our team has sought to draw the urban hospitality of tomorrow in synergy with the project carried by the AP-HP.

Since its foundation in 1870, the site of the Hôtel Dieu has been transformed, accentuated, marked by the "sanitary" requirements of the different eras crossed. In the second half of the twentieth century, when the maximum capacity of the hospital is reached, the courses are then invested by new buildings that cut with the historical aspect around.

Today, the AP-HP site is an aggregate of diverse and varied architectural interventions, making the reading and the nature of these buildings more complex. We suggest then, by our intervention to restore an architectural and patrimonial cohesion to this ensemble by advocating the return to an "ideal state" of the site, more crossed, reversible, urban.