Demolish to rebuild almost identically… This is the absurd project that takes shape in Malakoff, at the gates of the Paris ring road. Since 1974, the INSEE building, a giant of glass and concrete, has stood on the outskirts of the capital. In a few months, the demolition work will start with the dismantling of the building with the reconstruction project in the same place, a new building with an equivalent area to house the new center of social ministries, which will house the Ministry of Solidarity and Health and the Ministry of Public Health are brought together. of Work, Employment and Integration. An ecological incapacity denounced by the citizens’ collective IMMEUBLEINSEEPASFINI in a petition.
In place of this tripod of 32,500 m2 offices and 50 meters high, another bar will be built, of a similar surface, and still for office use, which will extend the sad glass wall that now stands at the gates of Paris.
According to experts, the rehabilitation of the INSEE building, built by architects Serge Lana and Denis Honegger “presents a rich spatial and constructive potential and forms the basis for a sober and innovative project”specifies the text of the petition that has already been signed by more than 17,500 people.
So why persist in bringing down this concrete giant to replace it with a structure of the same kind, asks the citizens’ collective at the origin of the petition. Together they ask Olivier Dussopt, Minister of Labour, Employment and Integration, and François Braun, Minister of Solidarity and Health, to bury this project that consumes too much CO2.
25,000 round trips Paris-Marseille by car
In total, 50,000 tons of concrete and thousands of tons of steel have to be dismantled and then transported by a thousand trucks to eventually be destroyed. And all this to rebuild on a building of similar dimensions and identical use.
However, the collective remembers “We now know that demolition produces huge amounts of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, and construction even more. On the scale of the reinforced concrete that makes up this building alone, 6,000 tons of CO2 will be added over a hundred years to the emissions already emitted during the construction of the existing building. That is the absorption of CO2 over a year by about 250,000 mature trees or the equivalent of 25,000 round trips Paris-Marseille by car.”
At a time of climate danger and when the French state has already been convicted of climate inaction in “The Case of the Century”, according to the collective, only one solution is acceptable: rehabilitation.
The transformation of the “already present”, the adaptation of what already exists, is one of the weapons in the fight against climate change.
If you also want to send a clear signal to the state to call for this demolition project to be halted in order to restructure the INSEE building, join the movement and sign the petition here.