Rediscover some of the achievements of architect and urban planner Roland Castro, who died on Thursday. The man was also known for his political career as a “sixty-eighter” and left-wing activist.
The architect, urban planner and left-wing activist Roland Castro, died Thursday March 9, 2023 at the age of 82. A figure of May 68, a colorful character, Roland Castro had made architecture a political fight against the “apartheid” of the cities and he left his mark on many cities and districts of France. Back on some of his many achievements, and on one of his last projects concerning Greater Paris which never saw the light of day.
1 The Saint-Denis Labor Exchange (1983)
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Inaugurated in January 1983, the building of the Saint-Denis Labor Exchange, in Seine-Saint-Denis, is one of the first major achievements of the architect Roland Castro. This “building is dated“, he admitted thirty years later in the Journal de Saint-Denis in 2013. But, he specified, “dated like a first work that wants to tell his whole life at once.” “I remain convinced that it is a rather amusing place, not classically functional”, he added. “When we say of a place that it works well, I find it silly. I preferred that we put the means in the circulation, where we meet and where we exchange.”
2 The International City of Comics and Images in Angoulême (1990)
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For this setting of the 9th art, visited each year by tens of thousands of people, Roland Castro designed with his counterpart Jean Remond at the end of the 80s a building of stone, glass and metal, in a strong architectural gesture and original combining classicism and futurism. Inaugurated in January 1990 by Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture and Communication, it is one of thehe major architectural and urban planning works that marked the presidency of François Mitterrand. This emblematic place of Angoulême has allowed comics to become its visiting card in the world to the point that the city was labeled in 2019 Unesco Creative City.
3 The metamorphosis of the Quai de Rohan in Lorient (1996)
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Rather than demolish, Roland Castro preferred to modify the existing, especially the gray and concrete cities, to give them a new lease of life. This is precisely what he did on the Quai de Rohan in Lorient (Morbihan) which he thoroughly transformed in the 1990s.preserve the memory of the places”, he explained in the newspaper The Telegram during a visit to Lorient in 2005. “It’s gratifying for the people who live in the neighborhood, whereas a demolition operation can be very violent. And it’s more expensive“.
4 The “Central Park” of Grand Paris in La Courneuve (project)
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As early as the 1980s, Roland Castro, who was delegate for the renovation of the suburbs from 1985 to 1990, worked on the idea of Greater Paris, which he envisaged as “a collection of villagesIn 2008-2009, he took part in the consultation launched on this subject by President Nicolas Sarkozy. housing along the Parc de La Courneuve, a haven of peace and greenery of 417 hectares, 310 of which are Natura 2000 classified, wedged between motorways and expressways. Presented in October 2014, this idea of Roland Castro was strongly contested, the inhabitants of all the department standing up against this project of “concreting of the green lung of 93“.