A 72 hours international architectural competition to design the car park of the future! 

The "Carpark Futures Competition" invites young architects under 40 years old, from all over the world, to think about the architectural, technical and environmental potential of a revaluation of underground car parks.

Objective of the competition​​: How to transform underground parking spaces to fit contemporary societal evolutions? How can architecture respond to the challenges of future mobility and urban density?

While many urban centers rely on their presence in many ways, underground parking facilities have often been the forgotten part of architecture and urban planning. Historically, the introduction of underground car parks in dense urban centers from the 1970s onwards made it possible to integrate individual mobility into urban fabrics that predated the appearance of the car. The underground proved to be the preferred space to include huge surfaces for hosting this new technology of mass mobility. Today, underground parking lots are sometimes under-used and offer significant reserves of surface area, volume and property, whose potential is immense. It is now necessary to go beyond a vision of the underground car park as a simple inert storage space, in order to allow its integration into major metropolitan developments, by introducing new programs, new uses, and new architectural qualities. The idea of an underground real estate development, or "Sub-estate", can now be considered as a strategy for an optimized, resilient urbanism, imagining the city as a system rooted in the ground.

The objective of the "Carpark Futures Competition" will be to consider the transformation of these underground infrastructures by proposing an architectural intervention in line with the new practices linked to mobility, urban logistics or the evolution of lifestyles and consumer habits.

The « Carpark Futures Competition" will focus on a specific area of a vast district developed in the 1990s to realize the ambitions of a regional metropolis with European vocation: Euralille.
The « Carpark Futures Competition" will focus on a specific area of a vast district developed in the 1990s to realize the ambitions of a regional metropolis with European vocation: Euralille. - The city of Lille, in northern France, strategically located at the center of the European triangle formed by the cities of Brussels, London and Paris, was determined to seize the opportunity to become a major business and transportation hub with the imminent creation of its Lille-Europe TGV station. The designer of Euralille, Rem Koolhaas, has planned an international business center on some 120 hectares of former military land a few steps away from the historic center, extending to a European territory of 70 million inhabitants. On this huge area, 800'000 m2 of activities have been developed as well as a complex superposition of architectures and infrastructures, designed by many renowned architects: Jean Nouvel, OMA, Claude Vasconi, Christian de Portzamparc, etc. At the heart of this area is the Euralille car park, study area for this competition. 

Organizers: Inspired by their studies and research on the potential of underground car parks synthesized through the document "Carpark Futures, Opportunities in the underground", the architect Dominique Perrault and Indigo Group organize this first international architectural competition open to the new generation of designers! 

  • Indigo Group is a world leader in parking, personal mobility and city services. The Indigo Group's activities cover several business lines: on-street and off-street parking, urban logistics and soft mobility. Indigo designs, builds, finances and operates parking solutions in more than 2,720 locations in over 350 cities and 11 countries, and manages more than 2,160 km of roadways. To meet the needs of its customers and offer the smoothest possible journey, Indigo also develops digital solutions such as OPnGO.
  • DPA-X, founded by architect and urban planner Dominique Perrault, is a forward-looking research platform. Its objective is to accelerate architectural innovations to accompany new metropolitan developments. The diversification and insertion of the underground space in these dynamics is in line with the research and projects developed by the architect, crystallizing the concept of "Groundscape" as a strategy for resilient urban development, combining architecture, infrastructure and landscape.

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