Our proposal for Recypark Jette challenges the conventional recycling park, transforming it into a space that rethinks giving, taking, and reuse. Strategically positioned between Jette’s residential fabric and the growing green corridor of Tour & Taxis, it plays a vital role in reinforcing and expanding the city’s ecological network.
In this densely built-up area, accessible green space is in short supply – often fragmented, hidden, or too exposed to invite real use. What’s missing is a place of quiet and connection, sheltered yet open to all. This absence mirrors a broader urban need, one already being addressed at Tour & Taxis. Recypark Jette responds in kind, transforming a recycling facility into an eco-park where circular thinking and urban nature come together.
Unlike a traditional park, an enclosed garden fosters a more delicate botanical and ecological balance, allowing both flora and fauna to thrive. This raises a crucial question: What is most valuable in an urban garden today? To us, the answer lies in biodiversity, carbon capture, cooling, water retention – but equally in intimacy, hospitality, and the possibility of spontaneous human connection. Recypark Jette aspires to be just that: an enclosed piece of nature, offering both respite in greenery and opportunities for meaningful encounters.
Its users will be diverse: employees, local schools, neighbours, visitors, and even small urban wildlife. The design takes shape through engagement, adapting to the needs and rhythms of those who inhabit it. Tucked into the eastern corner of the site, the garden softens the urban edge, while a preserved structure forms a generous gateway, marking the transition from street to site, from city to garden.
The organisational model reinterprets the Dutch recycling park typology – centred on a clear, elevated square with containers discreetly housed behind a concrete wall – into a structured and navigable public space. Expanded to include a give-away store, the layout invites a greater sense of comfort and hospitality. Four integrated drive-through lanes create a hybrid configuration that balances logistical efficiency with spatial openness, positioning Recypark Jette not as a peripheral facility, but as a generous civic resource.
Radical reuse defines the architecture throughout the site. Rather than erasing the industrial past, the design builds upon it, assembling a highly composed ensemble from reclaimed and new materials. Existing structures are selectively preserved, reinterpreted, and extended using robust elements recovered from other projects. Prefabricated concrete, repurposed steel, timber, and reused bricks come together in carefully detailed combinations, blurring the line between found and made. The result is not a neutral backdrop, but a tactile environment that speaks of care, pragmatism, and craft.
Recypark Jette is both infrastructure and invitation – an urban gesture that redefines waste as potential, and a recycling park as a place of care. By fusing ecological value with civic generosity, it transforms a utilitarian typology into a meaningful public space. Here, efficiency meets intimacy, and circularity becomes part of the city’s everyday life.