Residents of Rue de la Tour in Millery wanted to restore the former train station site as a meaningful place, while linking it to contemporary issues.
Millery is a commune in the Rhône department, located 15 km south of Lyon, at the very point where the landscape shifts towards the countryside. Between the wetlands and the hills runs the Saint-Étienne–Lyon railway line, France’s first passenger railway, opened in 1831 and still one of the busiest lines in the country today. The “Tour de Millery” used to be a stop on this line, which was suspended in the 1980s. Since the station’s closure and its subsequent demolition in the 1990s, this once-vibrant place has become a forgotten, anonymous and degraded space, often used as an illegal dumping ground.
The main aim expressed by the commissioning group, residents of Rue de la Tour where the station once stood, is to reclaim this space as a place of significance. To achieve this, they advocate grounding the site in its rich history, largely unknown to most residents, and, above all, connecting it to today’s environmental issues: as a gateway to a remarkable nature reserve — the wetlands — its location near one of France’s largest industrial zones (the Rhône chemical valley) and close to a major European city makes its preservation a constant challenge.
This is what the artist, designer and architect Mattia-Paco Rizzi set out to do by proposing the new “Tour de Millery,” a new symbol for the neighbourhood serving both as a landmark along the railway for its thousands of daily commuters and as a social hub for local residents and visitors alike.
