WORDS THAT PROTECT | 2021-2022

Designers: Agency Team, Agence Michel Tortel, Toulon, France
Manufacturers: URBASTYLE, Tournai, Belgium

Anti-intrusion street furniture system. Letters in fibre-reinforced concrete spell out words, create poetry, provide information, communicate and breathe life into the city. They can be arranged to create an infinite variety of words. Winner of the competition for Grand Paris stations organised by SGP and IDFM. These barrier blocks make it possible to create a safety zone such as a park, a shopping street, a playground, a building, etc.
Make your access area unique by creating your own text.

The blocks are anchored in the ground, which makes it impossible to overcome the barrier. Depending on the layout and distance between blocks, you can limit traffic to pedestrians, cyclists, cars or trucks. Totally unexpected urban objects, that we caress, that we appropriate and that we savor while moving or sitting down. Urban objects that allow you to create social ties, play and learn. This solution transforms the mass needed to stop a vehicle into a poetic collective object that makes sense both through its use and through the words that can describe a use.It invites citizens to read, to take the time, to slow down their movement, to question themselves. It also gives importance to writing on a real, fixed and durable medium, to words and their weight! The furniture offers a sense of protection and security that is readable and clear through their reassuring mass and height.

Letters neither too high, because they do not hide the view, nor too low or narrow like the classic anti-ram elements which sometimes give a feeling of fragility or aggressiveness. They offer smooth and simple filtering allowing strollers and bicycles to pass comfortably. They also allow a signaling function thanks to their size which allows them to be seen from afar. Related uses such as sitting in hollow letters such as C, discussion in standing support and play for children are possible. Made with proven, low-polluting, renewable and economical technology, the letters require no maintenance. According to the letters the mass varies from 820 Kg for the T for example to 1237 Kg for the R.

The hollow closed letters have a high bottom and receive a drain for rainwater. The letters are placed by cranes via screwed supports dismantled after installation Users easily and enthusiastically appropriate these rewarding and pleasant urban objects. The openness to words, to the fields of knowledge and transmission that this furniture allows, offers countless possibilities for entertainment. It would be easy to federate inhabitants, to animate places by inviting poets, visual artists or musicians who would have carte blanche to evoke a letter or a word. We could also create word festivals, eloquence contests.