Porte de Clignancourt is a strategic urban location and pivotal point between Paris and its suburbs, between the metropolitan scale and historical suburban fabric of the Saint-Ouen Flea Market (Puces). In an environment marked by unplanned urbanization and pronounced social contrasts, Paris Puces offers a welcoming sanctuary that breaks with the concrete constructions surrounding it. Through its height, wooden structure and large openings that, like a silent theatre, offer a window onto the life inside, the edifice embodies a high point in the site’s renewal. With a programme resolutely focused on production, design, artisans, transmission of knowledge, animation and culture, Paris Puces brings various publics together so the neighborhood is no longer simply a place cars drive through but an essential address, especially for young people.

The regular framework of the building and lightness of assembly inherent to wooden structures gives the project a great deal of organizational flexibility and versatility. In particular, the building can adapt to major upcoming urban changes, such as the transformation of Paris’ ring highway into a calmer urban boulevard open to bikes and pedestrians. The building responds to the undeniable problems currently generated by the major roadway with a protective transparent envelope that is both open to the landscape and a support for vegetation. Combining structural rationality and the poetic materiality of wood, Paris Puces offers maximum comfort of use without the addition of costly technological systems to refresh it, purify it or lessen the noise level.