FINAL THESIS PRODUCTIVE MATRIX

Author: Théa Spring Advisor: Iñaki Alday

On the eastern edge of Paris, in the commune of Montreuil, there sits a landscape called the Murs à Pêches. The 10-foot walls striating its soil have existed since the mid17th century. Built and maintained as an agricultural tool, they shielded winds and stocked heat to provide the plots with a microclimate 45 to 50 degrees warmer than the surrounding area. As Parisian demand for fruits and vegetables grew through the 18th and 19th centuries, a complex and experimental system was developed by the Montreuillois combining horticulture, viticulture, and arboriculture. By the end of the 18th century, the area of the Murs à Pêches reached its apogee with over 300 hectares of walled lots — one-third of Montreuil.

Today, the remaining 30 hectares survive as an enclave between programmatically specialized zones of the Paris banlieue. For unfamiliar Parisians, the half-ruined walls look like imminent victims to residential development. For others, the Murs à Pêches’s preservation is imagined as a kind of soft horticultural museumification. Yet, in the last few decades, the ambiguous identity of this half-forgotten territory has proven to be very generative for a diverse range of cultural, educational, social, and economic activities.

This thesis proposes a further evolution of the Murs à Pêches into a dense metabolic and agricultural urbanity. Informed by the land’s historic logics of production, cultural history, and contemporary urban needs of surrounding banlieues, strategic public space interventions and metabolic elements are designed to structure and power a new kind of productive landscape. Though the Murs à Pêches is rich in singularities, many of its social, economic, and environmental issues are widely common in other parts of Grand Paris and other extended metropolises. This thesis is driven by a desire to explore the constructive tensions between site specificity and broader social and environmental urgencies, as they will be arguably central to architecture for the years to come.

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Edited by Andrea Bardon de Tena

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Tulane School of Architecture

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Indexing

ISBN: 978-1-63840-070-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946039

Publication date: November 2022