Hasta La Ideas

French architects ECDM have completed a nursery in Paris with rippling concrete walls.

The billowing curves of the facade were created using a series of prefabricated panels, which wrap around three sides of the Crèche Rue Pierre Budin but are only interrupted by windows on one elevation.

A central courtyard is located at the heart of the two-storey building, surrounded by nursery rooms that accommodate up to 66 children.

A tree-like metal umbrella shades this courtyard and can be seen hovering above the rooftop from the street.

Other projects we’ve featured by ECDM include a spotty bus station and a residence for students and women in distress.

See all our stories about ECDM »

See all our stories about nurseries and kindergartens »

Above: photograph is by ECDM

Photography is by Luc Boegly, apart from where otherwise stated.

The text below is from ECDM:

Day Nursery in Paris

The project takes place into a heterogeneous district made of buildings of any sizes, of any styles, any periods. It’s an environment slightly old-fashioned, hybrid and disintegrated, typical of the heterogeneous architecture which characterizes the Parisian peri-urban zones.

Above: photograph is by ECDM

Modernity came to complete this disorder : Adjacent to the site, an out of size construction, built in derogation of the property limits (adding a supplementary urban intention parameter), forbids any common denominator, any possibility of creating a homogeneous composition.

Above: photograph is by Benoît Fougeirol

The day-nursery is thus an attempt, for a tiny building of public utility, to exist in an unfavorable relationship in the shade of a twelve story construction which takes light, overhangs and crushes everything.

The program of the day-nursery introduces a small size, a small scale. If the volume comes from the requirements of the project concerning surfaces and scale, the writing of the building results from its specificity. The day-nursery is a horizontal. Protective and introverted, it occupies the ground, interacts with the outside spaces. Developed on two levels, it is organized to get the maximum of light and sunshine, and to by-pass the shade of the giant nearby building.

The project mixes the outside and internal spaces, organizes around a walk the 2 levels in a buckle of small paths and terraces, altering green and mineral areas. From the requirements of the program, it results a monolithic and protective facade. The building is in prefabricated concrete, long-lasting and resistant to the torments of the urban life. The surrounding wall is drilled by translucent and colored windows. These windows have various heights, for a place thought as much for the children than¬¬ for the adults, the parents or the staff.

The housing part is treated as entity. The matter is to propose an autonomous writing to an additional element, both complementary and exterior to the program of the nursery itself, to propose to the future inhabitant a living environment desynchronized from his workplace.

This volume lays on the nursery, slightly out of the building line, in order to give a specific urban writing to this residential space.

The project is a setting of a living place, with its specificities, its needs and also its poetic dimension, the goal is to propose for this tiny program a frame of living that generates as much an emotion with the future occupants (children, parents, staff) than the local residents.

Program: Day Nursery for 66 children and 1 service apartment
Client: Ville de Paris
Architect: Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec architectes (ECDM)
Engineering: C&E ingenierie, Cotracoop (mandataire du groupement d’entreprises), Bonna Sabla et Il Cantiere, Lafranque
Location: 15 Rue Pierre Budin, PARIS XVIII
Site area: 875 m² SHON / 1937 m² SHOB
Cost: 3.1 M€ HT
Finished: 2012
Photographers: Luc Boegly, Benoît Fougeirol

The new Paris store for fashion designer Stella Cadente is a tunnel lined in gold.

Designed by French architects Atelier du Pont, the cylindrical shop showcases clothing and accessories within the rectangular recesses of its curved walls.

Gold leaf covers almost every interior surface, including the mannequins.

The theme continues on the exterior, where a glazed facade is surrounded by a gilt frame.

We’ve noticed an increase in golden buildings in recent months and have recently featured both a library and a museum clad in golden metal. See these projects and more here.

Photography is by Sergio Grazia.

The text below is from Atelier du Pont:

Stella Cadente’s Paris boutique

Stella Cadente + Atelier du Pont = fabulous stories

The story of Stella Cadente and Atelier du Pont goes back a long way. It’s a story of a friendship between two women – Stella Cadente, a designer, and Anne-Cécile Comar, an architect – and, of course, of shared adventures, with their complementary professions and points of view.

For a previous concept store in Dubai, Atelier du Pont came up with a design midway between an ice palace and a crystal maze for Stella Cadente. It espoused the brand’s style based on light, crystal, magic and transparent dress. Thousands of stalactites changed colour, creating an impression that the store had come alive.

Now they have teamed up again in 2012 under the skies of Paris. Clothed in glass from top to toe, the boutique stands out from the sober lines of the Boulevard Beaumarchais due to its gilded metal frontage. This new Parisian space breaks with the conventions of usual stores. Inside it is cylindrical, broken into two ellipses. The shop window display stand is out: the clothes are laid out on a large draper’s table, and the soft, practical design makes a mockery of the XXS-sized Parisian boutique. The final radical change is in colour, as the interior is entirely covered in gold leaf.

Architect: Atelier du Pont (Anne-Cécile Comar, Philippe Croisier, Stéphane Pertusier)
Client: Stella Cadente
Location: 102 boulevard Beaumarchais Paris 11th – France
Completion: March 2012

Dutch designers Studio Makkink & Bey have completed a store for shoe brand Camper in Lyon with staircases that seem to go on forever.

The stairs form display stands for shoes and are outlined in bright red to merge with graphics printed onto the walls as though the steps continue.

More shoes are displayed on recessed shelving and the highest shelves can be reached using mobile blocks of yet more steps.

Camper often commission well-known designers to create the interiors for their stores, such as Nendo, Jaime Hayon, and Doshi Levien. See all our stories about Camper here.

Photography is by Sanchez y Montoro.

Here’s some more information from Studio Makkink & Bey:

Camper Shoe Store

Studio Makkink & Bey were inspired by basic walking movements for the design of a new concept store for Camper in Lyon.

Movements forward, upward and downward are shaped in staircase pedestals, stools or stepladders and outlined in bright red lines on the stairs, walls and floors.

The stairs represent the conjunction of separate places.

While performing as a place to meet, sit on or pass through, they expand places and establish rhythm, depth and infinity of spaces.

This is the studio’s first cooperation with Camper as part of the Together Project.

Camper Shoe Store

Rue de la Republique 58

69002 Lyon, France

Paris firm Moussafir Architectes have blanketed the roof of this concert hall in Tours, France, with a synthetic material that looks more like a quilt.

Named Le Temps Machine, which translates as The Time Machine, the venue contains two auditoriums that burst up through its roof, one displaying a glowing digital clock.

The glazed facade and entrance are sheltered beneath a canopy of projecting eaves.

The walls of the remaining elevations are exposed concrete, as are those in the corridors of the building.

Above: photograph is by Benoît Faure

We’ve featured quite a few concert halls on Dezeen. You can see them all here.

Photography is by Jérôme Ricolleau, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some extra information from Moussafir Architectes:

‘Le Temps Machine’, Concert Venue, Joue-Les-Tours, France

The former Joué-lès-Tours youth centre was a blocky, opaque, inward-looking building that failed to interact with the surrounding public space and no longer met current standards and requirements. The architectural design for the new music facility responds to a three-fold objective: to open the building up to its surroundings, to improve the way the opaque block integrates with existing buildings, and emphasise the festive dimension of the facility by making a unique architectural statement.

Above: photograph is by Luc Boegly

We chose to situate the new building where the old one stood, and to reinterpret some of the latter’s salient features (such as its prow-shaped auditorium) while offering the space a radically new image by opening it up to its context.

With its generously glazed street-side entrance, the building’s exterior features deep projecting eaves and a strongly cantilevered auditorium providing both an impression of lightness and a sense of hospitality vis-a-vis the public space and dwellings nearby.

To improve its contextual integration, we have divided the structure into two parts functioning in different registers: a determinedly horizontal 2m50 tall concrete and glass base housing a fluid, open interior space, and a roof with the three main components of the design brief (the two performance areas and the resource centre) bursting through it like opaque excrescences.

This duality is emphasised by the use of contrasting materials: hard on the outside (raw concrete, glass, stainless steel) and soft on the inside (membrane stretched over exterior insulation materials).

With its complex volumetrics and textured outer surface, the new building stands out like a beacon in the urban landscape.

The contradictory image we were aiming at is one of a unique yet familiar object that is challenging and yet invites appropriation: a sculptural design that refers to nothing that already exists, but which users can easily engage with, both in functional and symbolic terms.

Client: TOUR(S) PLUS (Tours City Council)
Address: 49, rue des Martyrs, 37300 JOUE-LES-TOURS

Above: photograph is by Benoît Faure

Brief: Concert facility to replace the existing youth centre, including a concert space for a standing audience of 650, a 150-seat cabaret-style space, a resources centre, and 3 rehearsal studios with service areas.

Materials: Colourwashed raw concrete, solvent- and plastics-free FPO roofing membrane by Sika Sarnafil, glazed stainless steel, Fibracoustic panels of wood fibre and rockwool, door/windowframes aluminium (exterior), steel and wood (interior).

Budget: 5,300,000 €. ex tax.

NSA: 1,753 sq m.

Architects: Jacques Moussafir avec Nicolas Hugoo, Alexis Duquennoy, Narumi Kang, Sofie Reynaert, Jérôme Hervé and Virginie Prié

Partner engineers: A&T (stage designers), Ayda (acoustic designers), Batiserf (structural engineers), LBE (mechanical engineers), Bureau Michel Forgue (quantity surveyor).

Contractors: DV Construction (general contractor), AMG Féchoz (stage machinery), Bideau (stage electrics), VTI (wooden stage flooring), Edmond Petit (stage fabrics).

A comprehensive look at 16 years of contemporary design spanning products, architecture and art installations

Aiming to rethink the way we interact with design in our everyday lives, Paris-based Matali Crasset creates unconventional work in nearly every area of design from products and interiors to architecture and art, asserting herself as one of the most acclaimed and intriguing designers in contemporary culture. Celebrating this extensive body of work is “Matali Crasset: Works“, a massive monograph spanning 16 years of diverse projects.

Organized in reverse chronological order and separated into color-coded sections whose graduated pages form an easily navigable and nicely graphic index, the book offers a visual timeline of Crasset’s design portfolio from 1995-2011 with insightful essays and more than 700 brightly hued images. Her clever and colorful designs create their own social narrative through multi-use spaces and objects in the designer’s distinct way that esteemed curator Zoe Ryan says extends “beyond traditional questions of form and function” in the book’s introduction.

Bucking conventional methods by publishing the introduction on the yellow hard cover, the anthology starts before even being opened, asking the reader, “Do Matali Crasset’s designs playfully return experience to its central place in our relationship with the world?” At the same time that Ryan points out Crasset’s boundless style, she outlines the designer’s three fundamental values—conviction, an heuristic approahc and a horizon—before we even open the book.

One clear example of Masset’s spirit of design can be seen in Phytolab, a transparent educational room where students learn the benefits of plant life simply by being surrounded by it. This unique design encourages guests to interact with the plants through gardening, drawing a connection to how we view and care of ourselves. The innovative laboratory of sorts embodies Casset’s drive to improve the way we experience design and navigate our surroundings.

The comprehensive “Matali Crasset: Works” is now available directly through Rizzoli and from Amazon as well. For a deeper look into Matali Crasset: Works see the gallery below.