La Condition Publique in Roubaix controlled, stocked and packaged wool, cotton and silk from 1902 to 1972. Acquired by the Municipality of Lille in the year 2000, the building underwent a rehabilitation plan to become a place of cultural production, a place to live, work and disseminate art. The adjustments were made whilst striving to preserve the memory and originality of the site marked by its facades (classified on the Historical Monuments’ complementary inventory), its planted roofs and its inside street – which would favour this transformation operation’s becoming a permanent “cultural site”. Experimentation was mainly to be centred on the treatment of the reinforced concrete roofs. Over time, the flat slabs covered in sand and gravel, had become covered over with plant life and city dust, which had created a fertile substrata. This prairie had become a conservatory of industrial history thanks to what was dropped there by the wind, the bales of wool and pollution. The cultural program was broadened, gaining an unsuspected poetic and scientific angle, brought by artist and botanist Liliana Motta, in connection with Lille-III University and its “biology and environment” department, specialising in the recapture of waste zones. ‘This vegetation was not only extremely diverse, but also linked to immigration. It was interesting to note that in Roubaix, where a lot of foreign communities have flourished, the plants also came from abroad; we decided to keep this historical earth and inventory and classify it, in order to keep a record of these migrations’ (P. Bouchain).
