“We really define ourselves as researchers, as well as architects,” architectural designer at Lina Ghotmeh Architecture Rohan Golestani told the six winners of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2026 Dulux Study Tour in the firm’s Paris studio. The practice, famously founded on Ghotmeh’s desire to approach architecture as “archaeology of the future,” follows on from her longstanding interest in archaeology, and a motivation to create memorable and site-specific architecture emerging from a close historical reading of place and environment. It is a fitting framework through which to view Paris, a city layered with many built histories, particularly as it evolves to meet the demands of climate change, population growth and the conservation of its heritage.
Paris is perhaps best understood as a palimpsest – a record of iterative inscriptions, erasures and revisions made in urban fabric. Each significant rewriting of the city’s form can be traced to events of social, political, economic and technological revolution.
On a cycling tour northward from the riverbank of the Seine, tour guide and architect Catherine Haas explained how Paris had originated as a small Gallic settlement, expanding radially outward with the establishment of successive city walls, each serving a specific purpose. The first defensive city boundary, a Gallo-Roman enclosure, was redrawn on several occasions: twice in medieval times, later in the fourteenth century and again in the seventeenth century. In 1784, just a few years before the French Revolution, a new city wall – the wall of the Fermiers généraux (Farmers General), designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux – again commenced construction, this time as an initiative to tax goods and people entering the city. A final outer fortification, created between 1841–1846, was adopted as the city’s new limits by French Emperor Napoleon III and his prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann in 1859, more than doubling the city’s area and resulting in the establishment of its 20 arrondissements.
Inevitably demolished, or buried beneath newer layers of built fabric, only remnants of these historic walls remain visible today – their outlines traced with roadways such as the Boulevard Périphérique, and dotted with monuments such as Ledoux’s Rotonde de la Villette (1788). While on the city’s outskirts at “le Périph,” as it’s known to locals, the tour winners observed how the previous politic of these sites – as limitors and segregators – had been thoughtfully redefined by a collection of contemporary civic and cultural projects.
Among these was the Stade (Stadium) Jules Ladoumègue (1972), an indoor athletics hall designed by Jean Peccoux, which was partially reconstructed and extended by Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes in 2014 with the new Centre Sportif (Sports Centre) Jules Ladoumègue, located alongside the site of the former 1846 city wall. The way in which extension cleverly stacks indoor and outdoor sporting facilities atop a light rail depot was much admired by the winners, with tour recipient Callum Senjov noting that the project’s programmatic diversity had resulted in “[transport] infrastructure [becoming] a catalyst for broader public benefit in the nineteenth arrondissement.”
Nearby, the tour group also explored the Parc de la Villette and its iconic red follies – the realisation of a winning competition scheme from Bernard Tschumi Architects (1988). Haas described it as “not [merely] a park, but an exploded building,” comprising points, lines of circulation and surfaces. Tour recipient Jasmine Placentino saw it as a progressive reordering of what was once a livestock market – into a public city park.
Returning to Paris’s centre, a visit to the Bourse de Commerce revealed yet another dimension to the city’s historical layering. Here, Tadao Ando’s adaptive reuse of the city’s eighteenth-century grain exchange into a contemporary art gallery had involved the installation of a new concrete-shelled exhibition space within the central rotunda, which tour winner Ksenia Totoeva interpreted as a scaled version of the surrounding drum.
Reflecting on the relationship between Ando’s intervention and the existing building fabric, fellow tour recipient Sharaan Muruvan commented, “The new and the old didn’t feel like they were competing … it felt like they were complementing one another.” Winner Jack Gillmer agreed, noting, “[Ando’s] insertion introduces contemporary architectural language into a historic structure with remarkable restraint, balancing heritage with new cultural ambitions. Neither exists independently of the other, each enriching and informing the other. The result is … a reminder that architecture is always both inheritance and transformation.”
This sentiment remains at the core of Paris’s urban development, with a continual rewriting of the city’s built fabric remaining vital to its future evolution and adaptation to current challenges. Today, there are more than two million inhabitants within the metropolitan limits (still defined by Haussmann’s 1859 plan), equating to more than 20,000 people per square kilometre. The city is, according to Haas, five times denser than any other European capital.
While trying to meet the demands of population growth, and the unique challenge of population fluctuation resulting from tourism, Paris is also striving to adapt to the threats of climate change. In the face of increasing downpours and extreme flooding events, the city is turning itself into a green sponge with the creation of micro parks that increase the absorption of stormwater run-off and reduce urban heat island effects. Transformation of existing infrastructure, like the pedestrianisation of the 13-kilometre Georges Pompidou Seine river expressway by former mayor Anne Hidalgo in 2016, is also a significant part of the city’s adaptation.
In Gillmer’s view, Paris remains an archive of the social, political, economic and technological forces that have shaped it over time. He reflected, “[It] is a place where adaptation is not concealed but embedded within the urban fabric; where the evolution of society is inscribed into every building, street and public space.” The city’s continued appetite for change, always with respect for what has come before, offers a valuable lesson in city-making that is both site-responsive and forward-thinking. To embrace this approach, architects need only take up the role of archaeologists.
Lucia Amies is travelling with the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects Dulux Study Tour. Follow #2026DuluxStudyTour on social media and the blog.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
