De-Hardening the Urban Fabric: Usine d’art du canal - amateur arts institution Part 2 Project 2025 Harry Burrows University of Nottingham Nottingham | UK This Project is founded on a body of research which investigated the urban spatial performance of the growing and evolving relationship between institutional and public space. Specifically in the dense city of Paris, where the impact of creating public space is critical to urban life. This proposal tests this by exploring a strategy that ‘de-hardens’ an impermeable urban block in the periphery of Paris, through the literal and experiential process of opening public space from harder, private, urban forms. By utilising a former electricity factory, which was once the centralised hub of activity on the Saint-Martin Canal, this latent industrial site is reactivated into an animated open container on the canal frontage, aimed at decentralising institutional power in the city of Paris. The scheme uses collage to provide contrasting threshold conditions through the juxtaposition between the existing industrial vernacular and the bolder proposed interventions, in order to create coherent public spaces for amateur artists and local communities to inhabit. These feed into flexible and programmed spaces such as workshops, exhibitions and residency accommodation, with the ambition to catalyse and provide agency for the inner block to further ‘de-harden’, providing more public space and a decentralised institutional city presence in Paris. Tutor(s)