50 years ago, the five new towns around Paris did not have in mind the climate issues that they must now face. The situation has changed. Example in Évry-Courcouronnes.
We now know that fifty years ago, the oil companies knew what was going to happen, notably their fault, and that the question of the creation of the greenhouse effect went all the way back to the Carter White House. But in France, the question was not on the agenda. When we think that the earth from the Trou des Halles was transported by truck to Evry to make the Parc des Loges hill, by truck! A few months ago, L’Hemaa agency had drawn attention to this antecedent, delivering a leisure and sports reception center which still managed to reuse the Excavated soil from the Grand Paris Express for rammed earth whose thermal performance, far from being usual, still requires handling.
The Manouchian school by Tracks creates calm at the entrance to a Horizons district currently being remodeled. © Jonas Tophoven
The narrative and the audacity, among other performances of this childhood and sports center, well deserved the Prize for the first work of the Equerre d’argent 2025for an agency that has already launched soaring. As proof, the realization, 200 m away, of the House of Public Services Jacques Prévertan original grouping of public services for open up neighborhoods within which the population of the new town has cowered. In itself, the municipal planning decision leading to this project is already worthy of attention. Perhaps it corresponds to the work she asked of the young architectural agency SAFA, to redevelop both the municipal council room and the adjoining wedding hall? And what about the rehabilitation of the Horizons district which housed the Louise Michel hospital until 2010, where the new Missak and Mélinée Manouchian school, completed urgently by the Tracks agency, was able to rehouse the Coquibus school (NZI) which was partially burned in the middle of summer 2025 just before its opening?
Impeded urbanity
The Tracks school was closed like so many others at the peak of the last heatwave, but according to its occupants, it held up quite well thanks to its white bricks and its very large roof overhangs. Another dazzling star of the new generation of climate change architectsTracks can report two articles, on Release And West Francenoting the sustainable heat of its two new schools on the Island of Nantes (also Regional Wood Construction Prize) and in Mordelles near Rennes.
Transformation of Tower H of the former Louise Michel Hospital into housing. © Jonas Tophoven
After the years of founding, and years of stagnation, the city is rebuilt on the city with many issues. Despite the location of the RER station not far from the town hall, the Place des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen has no café, just the bland facade of an Ibis hotel. It’s not very inviting, compared to the splendid Cathedral of the Resurrection, in red bricks, by Mario Bottawho seems to have gone through his first thirty years without firing a shot. On the contrary, thework seems to become more than ever the symbol of Évry linked to Courcouronnes : an elegant circular brick building surrounded by trees. A whole resilience program.
Climate offensive
Stagnation? In any case, since the merger with Courcouronnes, Évry rethinks itself greener under the aegis offormer mayor of Courcouronnes, Stéphane Beaudet, who won the municipal elections and is therefore beginning a 5th mandate, the second at the head of the capital of Essonne; he chairs the Grand Paris Sud comcom and AMIF, the association of mayors of Île-de-France. A regional heavyweight which saw the construction of this new city which is now full of architectural nuggets of the brutalist and rationalist type, and will support its adaptation. We had Colombes, the city of the green wave of 2020, with construction and renovation of schools entrusted to Tectoniques, Hemaa, Tracks, highlighted as part of the visits to the 15th International Wood Construction Forum. We find the four stars of Hemaa and Tracks in Évry-Courcouronnes, and SAFA, starting with NZI which, after the success of the transformation of the Canal + studios into student housing (Regional Wood Construction Prize) and in parallel with the transformation of the garage on rue Nollet in Paris into housing (PRCB 2026), was the first to tackle the city’s biosourced shift with, excuse me, the construction of the largest school in the department, the Coquibus.
The interior courtyard of the Jacques Prévert Public Services House (HEMAA agency). © Jonas Tophoven
A new city that remains new
The new city did not prevent the asphyxiation of the Paris region, but as with all these major projects, the remodeling is perpetual and after 50 years, we are entering a phase of respectful adaptation of modernist urban planning in its human aspect, and inventive in exploiting the spaces of these cities in order to adapt them. There comcom Grand Paris Sud is not poorly endowed with the Seine and large forests. With his architectural heritage modern and contemporary, Évry-Courcouronnes becomes a tourist destination. But there needs to be a biogeosourced café or tea room on the Place des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen!
/ Jonas Tophoven / © Jonas Tophoven
