LLA
Home | Studio | Works | Notes | Contact

Shifting blueprint

The Productive Remediation of the Dunlopillo Site

2025
Mantes la jolie - FR
Europan 18

Program: Urban strategy, industrial conversion
Area: 11 ha
Team: Despo Panayidou
Status: Competition

At the heart of Mantes-la-Jolie lies a sleeping giant: the former Dunlopillo factory. This preserved industrial universe, currently a fallow brownfield, is a testament to a bygone era of productivity that shaped the city’s identity and imagination.

Today, the site stands as an urban enclave, its skeleton of buildings and machinery a relic of industrial glory, accompanied by a remnant of a workers’ city to the south. It is a highly polluted, mineral island, disconnected from major urban routes and the beautiful landscape of the Seine valley and its lakes.

Shifting Blueprint works with this legacy. The proposal is mitigating erasure via a productive remediation: a strategy that acknowledges the site's industrial past as a material and spatial resource, sequences the transformation so that each phase leaves the site more useful than it found it, and builds a renewed neighbourhood, focusing on working and living typologies, grounded in the specific identity of the Dunlopillo site rather than a generic urban programme.