Lecture - Frédéric Denise & Pierre Bouysset

"LE HANGAR ZÉRO is a place based in Le Havre – a Third Place, a Place of Social Utility, an "Infinite Place", a place of prefiguration – whose subtitle is "Citizen Laboratory for Ecological and Social Shifts". Its horizon is explicit: Zero Waste, Zero Carbon, Zero people left behind, Zero harm to biodiversity.

Housed in a former 19th-century coffee and cocoa port warehouse, it has been developing nearly 3,000 m² since 2016 through self-construction and with minimal impact, thanks to the spontaneous commitment of several hundred citizens. This piece of the city – a covered street open to working-class and port neighbourhoods – has organised itself as a self-managed cooperative (SCIC) and associative group, founded on principles of deep democracy.

Le Hangar Zéro hosts social, cultural and productive experiments aimed at prefiguring viable and desirable models that remain within planetary boundaries. Its most emblematic work concerns the building sector: it is helping to reintroduce the reuse of materials as a mainstream practice, turning the construction site into a full-scale demonstrator and a lever for transforming an entire industry. This momentum has since fostered the emergence of other cooperative ventures, notably in textiles, but also around local food, the fight against waste, the unconditional welcoming of all people, cultural programming, and monitoring and innovation on ecological and social issues.

The project was born from an observation made at COP21 in 2015: in the face of the absence of binding commitments from States, it was urgent to wait for nothing before taking action. The ambition was to give Le Havre a place where citizens, associations, businesses, artisans, farmers and other institutions could come together, make visible, and experiment with strategies for shifting course. At once ambitious, teeming with activity, and fragile, Le Hangar Zéro now radiates far beyond its own plot of land."

Hangar Zéro Website

Pierre Bouysset, architect and urban planner, co-initiator of Le Hangar Zéro. .
Practising both as an independent architect in Le Havre and as an architect-urban planner advising elected officials on transition policies in the Hauts-de-France region, he approaches architecture and the city from a social and political angle, viewing his discipline as an art of creating connections: social relationships, relationships with the living world, relationships with the world at large, and so on. It is particularly from this perspective that his role in the Hangar Zéro project took shape.

Frédéric Denise, architect, co-initiator and lead architect of Le Hangar Zéro.
After 25 years of independent practice, Frédéric Denise founded Archipel Zéro — a more collective, more inclusive agency, and above all one that reflects a shift in its approach to architecture. Already convinced of the value of promoting eco-materials and bioclimatic architecture, the new agency embodies our desire to orient our practice even further in this direction."