The site is located between pastures and activity areas in the semi-urban fringe located at the outskirts of the small town of Dommartin-lès-Toul. It extends on a gentle slope in front of the parking of the former American hospital and opens up to the panorama of the Moselle valley.
The value system based on which historical cities have been built has been substituted by the logic of traffic flow and lower cost. And even if it is unable to produce any urban quality, the so called “activity area” continues to be, most of the time, the place of work of contemporary architects, as it is where the cities expand and develop. At the same time, these unrestrained city fringes represent a source of imagination for the architects, a comparator, a particular landscape, extremely contemporary, hence fascinating, and therefore; able to convey emotions and memories.
The project is a public facility, situated on the new campus of Paris-Saclay. The building hosts a mix of activities including indoor and outdoor sports facilities, a restaurant, cafeteria, and various public spaces: a pedestrian square, street terraces, park areas for deliveries, bikes and cars. The building is organised vertically with its different activities superimposed on one another, using the roof as a panoramic playground for football and basketball games. The different areas are linked by an open staircase that allows independant accesses. The building takes the form of an urban shelf, a vertical public space, accessible to all campus visitors, day or night.
The residence is the first apartment building on the site of the urban renewal program implemented around the station. It is perceived as a flagship project, intended to strengthen the town’s identity. Outlines, scales, volumes and materials, defined in particular during the studies carried out for this “pilot” building project, enabled the definition of urban rules that will shape future projects all around it. It is a compact building where the work on the composition of volumes made it possible to integrate it into the loose urban fabric while simultaneously restructuring the latter. The complex composition of the façades is rendered visible across the entire length of the building through the differentiation of volumes, setbacks and materials. The prow black enameled brick marks the corner of the two future streets. Splitting the two volumes creates a more diverse morphology in the existing cityscape, while also marking the linear rhythm of the façades through fractures of several stories and top floor setbacks creating a greater sense of lightness.
In 2011, the Gaumont-Pathé group decided to renovate the existing building in order to upgrade the cinemas and to improve user comfort. This was part of a broader scheme to gradually update the image of their chain of cinemas, which often occupy exceptional, city-centre sites, but suffered from being seen as old-fashioned.
The aim is to transform them into high-quality cultural venues, animated day and night, and suffi ciently fl exible to accommodate a varied programme, mixing cinema with other cultural events: the image of the city cinema was to be entirely rethought.
The Multimodal Interchange project in Vitré comprises the creation of:
– A pedestrian footbridge in Vitré Station, spanning the railway
– An underground car park with 620 spaces, constructed in two phases, and an overhanging pedestrian footbridge, connecting the first footbridge to the “Place de la Victoire” (Victory Square) and thus creating a pedestrian thoroughfare from this square to the Station’s north car park
This project is the implementation of an urban strategy based on continuity with the existing built environment. The program is contained within two buildings: the first facing the street, with ground floor + 4 floors, containing seventeen apartments; the second, at the back of the lot, contains an additional eight. The first building opens to the rue Nicolo through façade detached from the ground and creating a passageway toward the center of the city block and to the vertical circulations.
Under the framework of the urban renewal program, the city of Nemours wished to build a social center and a cultural space on the grand esplanade of the Mont Saint-Martin neighborhood. The grouping of a facility of this importance with shops around a reorganized and upgraded public space aims to revitalize activity and strengthen social cohesion. Its central and exposed position help to underscore the building’s function as a public facility.
Electronic music is a new subject for architecture. Most of the times electro nights take place in spaces that were not specially designed for them: clubs or night clubs, warehouses, fields, stadiums… For the Grenoble project, the aim was to invent a specific architectural system for a new type of spectacle and relationship with the public, whilst allowing concerts with a more traditional configuration.
The question leading to the basic concept underlying this project was: how to offer the highest quality and most efficient ergonomic work spaces possible? The answer to this question resolved all the other issues facing the operation with regard to its insertion in the urban fabric, its environmental quality and the representation of the activity of banking in a period of financial crisis. Thus, the offices are distributed over three floors forming a thickness of 38 m, organized around two patios. The top floors are comprised of standard offices, and the C-suites, while the ground floor and the lower floors house public and shared functions: exhibition gallery, meeting and reception rooms, café, and restaurant serving the entire site, distributed around a broad atrium. This configuration ensures that all the offices benefit from equivalent spatial qualities and quality lighting. In addition, it fosters optimal communication between occupants and users and easy navigation of the site thanks to looping circulations.
Tags: France, Nantes Comments Off on New headquarters of Crédit Mutuel de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes, France by AIA Associés, associated with AIA Architectes and Intens-Cité
The building is located in a 1950s residential area in the Paris suburbs. The large sports hall is positioned at the far end of the site, giving the street a degree of amplitude and generating a public space which reinforces the building’s status as a community facility. The volume of the accommodation is in keeping with the houses in the neighbourhood. The fragmentation of the programmes produces a displacement between the two volumes, offering glimpses of the central part of the site and opening up views towards the gardens.
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