Les folies de Poissy

On one side, along the Seine, barges, fishermen’s huts, and other houseboats provide a powerful source of inspiration. On the other side, suburban pavilions form a relatively “anonymous” yet familiar fabric. Near Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the Parc du Peuple de l’Herbe represents a new model of ecological communal rural space.

The concept, proposed by HHF and AWP, results from a hybridization of these two housing models: the floating barge and the archetype of the suburban house. The project intensifies certain elements of the landscape—open horizons, the colonization of both animal and human fauna, and the lush vegetation of the Île-de-France region—and integrates them into an urban strategy of observation and traversal.

Within this open landscape, the insect museum blends into its site, deploying its wooden structure like an oversized stick insect. Its steel structure, both complex and radical, gives the belvedere the silhouette of a lanky creature: a strange, fiercely contemporary outpost for observing the landscape in 360 degrees.