L’utopie bucolique revisitée par l’architecture contemporaine L’exemple du centre commercial Waves Actisud de Moulins-Les-Metz

Abstract

Utopia is a blurred concept, multi-faceted and ever changing over time. In the Ancient Graeco-Roman world, it takes the form of a bucolic « bubble » of happiness. Theocritus, a 3rd century B.C. hellenistic poet, shapes it as a triangular relationship between the shepherd, his animals and his gods, in an idyllic nature and conceives it as a metapoetic exploration of literature; Vergilius, when he rewrites bucolic utopia, at the very end of the Republican Rome (37 B.C.), mingles it with the symbolism of Arcadia. Waves Actisud is the first Open Sky Shopping Center, opened in Moulins-lès-Metz, in october 31th, 2014, near the A31 highway. Built by the Phalsbourg Company, it plays upon bucolic utopia, reviving pastoral realities in the mercantile present of the 21th century. This contemporary architectural space works on geometric shapes, the outside and the inside, the light – as recommended by the Light Architecture –, while focusing on human needs and thinking of ecological problems. It was conceived as a soothing “matrix”, a “bubble” of bucolic welfare, and a commercial Arcadia in an urban peripheral zone. In that, it has some characteristics of a Utopia.