Designing on a large scale

Monuments, palaces, factories, headquarters, stadiums, museums, infrastructure transport: major projects arouse fascination for some and rejection for others the others. These large buildings, once representative of a state power or religious – palaces and places of worship – have been replaced by the development of large-scale industrial and cultural infrastructure – factories and museums. By their size and their power of attraction, these Infrastructures become the vector of transformations of urban territories and peri-urban areas, in a situation where the city can no longer be thought of only in terms of building ex nihilo, but rather in terms of sustainable transformation of an existing building. Through the study of numerous archival documents concerning the design of megaprojects such as the railway station Lyon, the Samaritaine, the Maine-Montparnasse complex, the reconversion of the Macdonald warehouse or even Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, Mathieu Mercuriali asks the question of the role that these large-scale infrastructures play scale in the mutation of cities and brings out new models interfaces in order to contribute to the creation of tools dedicated to stakeholders in the city.