Montparnasse Masterplan

In 2019, RSHP led the winning team for this competition run by the City of Paris, launched in tandem with the co-owners of the existing complex, the EITMM.

The project aims to radically transform this pivotal neighbourhood of more than 9 hectares, bordering both the Montparnasse station and Tower, by opening up the existing buildings on the site, creating new routes and vistas across the previously impassable and introverted shopping centre that currently dominates the approach to the station.

By rethinking traffic flows across the site, the project proposes the significant pedestrianisation of the streets in the neighbourhood, facilitating wayfinding, walking and cycling. As part of the low-carbon vision for this emblematic Parisian hub, more than 1,000 trees will be planted, creating 10,000m² of green space as part of an “urban forest” conceived by Michel Desvigne Paysagiste.

The project also proposes a renewal of the site through a strategy of diversification with a range of new residential, office, cultural and sporting amenities serving to strengthen the mix and resilience on the site, as well as seeking to animate and refresh its identity. The proposed phasing strategies seek to safeguard the scalability of the proposals, limiting their impacts and enabling the gradual transformation of a neighbourhood in flux.

The plinth formed by the shopping centre is opened up, revealed and made more accessible. The commercial offer is redeployed in the form of a pedestrian street that is open to the sky and organized to reflect pedestrian movements across the site.

Our proposal is based on a contemporary reinterpretation of Haussmann, delivering a sensitive, dynamic urban plan based on desire lines and thereby reflecting the movement of people across the site.

Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris said of our proposal: “Our challenge is to transform modernist urbanism of the 1950s and 1970s, to recompose and reconstitute this urban landscape in keeping with Paris’s fabric and with our climate commitments ”.