Hasta La Ideas

A shelving unit displaying children’s clothes doubles up as a plywood playhouse with a sliding staircase, swinging doors and removable furniture.

The playhouse occupies a children’s clothes shop in Paris, designed by French studio Mut Architecture and architect Benjamin Mahon.

The set of steps slide out to allow shop-workers to reach the highest shelves, while a hollow box on wheels rolls away to provide an island table.

Other interiors that integrate children’s play areas include a perforated bedroom wall that can be used as a ladder and a bed with a play den below.

Photography is by Mut Architecture.

The following short description is from the architects:

In collaboration with Benjamin Mahon, Mut architecture has completed a children’s store in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

The main concept for the store was to construct a large doll house within the store, a house you can pull drawers out of, swing doors from, ‪a doll house that lends itself to the imagination of children‬.

Ladders on wheels are embedded in the structure of the house, and a box is set within the house and can be removed to be used as a central island within the shop, to expose products.

From the street the giant house seems to be overwhelming the volume of the 16 meter square shop.

We used poplar plywood for the interior of the store with white stratification and mirrors to accent the fresh feel of the wood surfaces.

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Training Dresser by Peter Bristol	Rocker by Doshi Levien for Richard Lampert	Under My Roof by Christian Vivanco

Criss-crossing metal beams surround a first floor reading room at a multimedia library near Paris.

Designed by French architect Philippe Gazeau, the Médiathèque Romain Rolland is situated within a residential neighbourhood and overlooks a community park.

Offset behind the white lattice exterior and glazing is a second layer of criss-crossing beams, finished in black, that could be mistaken for shadows.

The reading room occupies the entire first floor of the building and surrounds an enclosed second floor mezzanine where multimedia facilities are located.

The ceiling of this room subtly undulates to create natural drainage slopes on the grass-covered roof above.

Offices, meeting rooms, toilets and an auditorium are located on the ground floor of the library.

Another recently featured building that employs metal latticework is a design institute in Hong Kong – see our earlier story here.

More stories about libraries on Dezeen »

Here are some more details from Philippe Gazeau:

Media Library Romain Rolland

Rue Albert Giry, quartier Cité Cachin, 93230 Romainville

The Romainville multimedia library is located in the heart of a dormitory town that is being completely renovated. The town planners wanted to open up the district by fragmenting the housing blocks, creating a central plain to provide a large park and two facilities, including the multimedia library which is intended to act as an attractive magnet on a neighbourhood level.

The new building floats between two flying carpets. Following a continuous movement, the multimedia library’s volume sweeps over the level of the street and the public garden to slide under the gentle slopes of its planted roof.

It is the project’s roof that gives the initial driving force. The roof’s hills and valleys transmit the sweeping movement through to the level of the central plain, crossing through the large reading room on the upper floor.

This is achieved by the negative curves reflecting the undulating movements of the roof through to the ceiling. As well as traversing, the oriented interior space of the reading room overlooking the street and garden is also traversed and suspended by the landscape as it rises up to become the ceiling.

The new media library at Romainville can be seen as a building with simple architectural forms, but with great power and expressive richness. It is a building ‘oriented’ between the new street and the large redesigned garden.

It is a building ‘hierarchized’ on the basis of 3 superimposed horizontal sequences: a base on the ground floor, a large metal covered hall on the first floor cantilevered on both the street side and the garden side, lastly a topographically undulating vegetated roof. These three main elements structure and bring together the building’s architectural and functional image.

The project is no more extensive than the surface area of the plot proposed in the overall development plan, thereby freeing up the largest possible area for the future garden. The main volume is aligned with the new street, but the ground floor recess under the first floor cantilever is an opportunity to lay out a vast covered, sheltered passage between the public roadway and the media library.

The building takes its characteristic appearance from the first floor metal structure’s extensive columnless overhang. On the street, the monumental awning opening onto this big covered area naturally signals the entrance to the building.

Some powerful architectural sequences accompany the user or visitor from the outside right into the heart of the media library: the parvis under the awning, the exhibition hall, the vertical link space with the grand staircase, from where you come to the main reading room.

Finding one’s way around is facilitated by the large north-east and south-west windows facing each other like a pair of indoor-outdoor bookends.

Another powerful feature of the reading room is its ceiling, which follows the underside of the undulating vegetated roof. The very fluid crossing space is also set in movement through the random shapes of the ceiling, contrasting with the straight frontage walls.

A second mezzanine floor houses the multimedia area: on the ‘Russian doll’ principle, this area readily accessible from the adult and children’s sections hovers slightly above the rest of the browsing areas for reasons of soundproofing, while remaining highly visible and attractive from the central area.

The two glass frontages are picture windows looking onto the city or the garden through the filter of the exterior metal structure A maintenance area midway between the glazed façade and the structure gives depth to the casing. This depth is used to install the outer blinds protecting the reading areas in conditions made to last.

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Circular translucent skylights nested in the roof bring extra light to the central area, while providing smoke ejection from the interior volume.

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The green roof is treated as a natural but hanging extension of the future garden. Its topography lends it a different status from the ordinary vegetated terrace roof. This roof can be seen from neighbouring buildings, and we feel it is very important that it blends in with the future landscaped area.

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The inverted impact of its undulations is a key element in characterizing the atmosphere in the large reading room, and evidences the determination for this project to be highly consistent, with continuity between the work on the interior spaces and the handling of the exterior architecture. The metal structure featuring like a grid around the first floor, and the cantilevering over the ground floor areas are the other main examples of this.

Client : Mairie de Romainville
Architect : Philippe Gazeau
Project manager : Lorraine Pele, Benjamin Clarens
Engineers : SLH
Area : 2085 m² SHON
Cost : 3 730 000 € HT
2004-2011

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Torre Telefónica Diagonal ZeroZero by EMBA	Pedestrian bridge by Bernard Tschumi	Design Institute by CAAU

Tiled surfaces, scientific apparatus and plastic curtains turn this Paris cafe into a coffee laboratory.

French studio Cut Architectures tore down a suspended ceiling and stripped away wallpaper from the former shop to reveal bare walls and original mouldings.

Visitors to Café Coutume are served drinks from conical flasks and can choose pastries from a white tiled display cabinet.

Flowering plants grow inside stainless steel sinks and an industrial coffee grinder is kept behind a clear plastic curtain.

Flooring and tables in the cafe are made from oak.

Fluorescent tubes hang vertically from the ceiling behind low-energy Plumen bulbs, which won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award 2011 earlier this year – see the story here.

Other recently featured cafes on Dezeen include one flanked by woven steel wire and another overlapping a car park – see all our stories about restaurant and bar interiors here.

Here is some more text from the architects:

Coutume is a new coffee roastery in Paris offering a cut edge selection of pure origin roasted coffees.

CUT architectures designed the first Coutume café in the centre of Paris combining a roastery and a café offering the best coffees in Paris and a neat selection of fresh and organic food and delicacies.

In the spirit of speciality coffee, the experts at Coutume give the opportunity to rediscover the coffee culture with high end tools and machines.

The blend of tradition, alchemy and technique inspired CUT architectures design.

Tearing down the walls and ceilings brought back a typical Parisian interior with high ceilings, mouldings, columns and an old shop door. A new oak flooring adds up to the Parisian atmosphere.

CUT architectures set in this decor a laboratory of coffee using square white tiles, grid lighting, stainless steel, industrial plastic curtains, laboratory glassware.

The plain oak tables were designed for Coutume as the fusion of this Parisian interior and the laboratory.

Coutume café’s design has been selected along wih Rem Koolhaas le Dauphin and Patrick Bouchain’s la Grenouillère by the restaurant critics of lefooding.com

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Grand Cafe Usine by Bearandbunny	Hatched by Outofstock	Federal Café by Barbara Appolloni

French architect Jean-Luc Fugier has designed a contorted timber hut to house a parking ticket machine.

Located in a car park outside Aix-en-Provence, the small building also houses a parking attendants office, a kiosk window, a restroom and a bin.

Horizontal timber batons wrap the exterior of the hut and an integrated canopy shelters ticket-purchasers.

A few other small projects featuring timber batons have been recently featured on Dezeen – see also a temporary theatre in Estonia and a pavilion of offcuts in Atlanta, Georgia.

Photography is by Philippe Piron.

More information is provided by the architects:

Parking Attendant’s Pavilion

The Story of a Parabolic Hyperboloid in Provence, France

The Task

To reduce downtown traffic congestion, the Communauté du Pays d’Aix (CPA) developed a strategy to encourage the use of public transit through drop-off parking lots in strategic locations around Aix-en-Provence. The first two parking lots used a simple prefabricated building that reflects the Provencal cabin, equipped with all of the characteristics meant to guarantee their local identity. For their third parking lot in the north-east area of the city known as The Pinchitats, the CPA decided to commission an architect to design the parking attendant’s pavilion instead of using that of the Planning Department.

Delighted by this opportunity of change, we were inspired to work with a reputable city open to contemporary architecture. Typical of design, the project emerged out of concern for the cultural context of the city. Is there place for a contemporary architectural project? What can we do to open their minds?

The interest in such a project proved to be much more than its small size, as it was quickly considered to be an amazing experimental opportunity. A bit of research on micro-architecture revealed that we were voyaging into a line of work called architectural follies.

How can a building so modest in size, with such dense program requirements and site restrictions find its identity? It must develop its own image while exhibiting to the project’s environmental concern and maintaining the simplistic quality of similar small-scale public buildings.

The Project

The parking lot is situated outside of the city centre surrounded by a lush landscape, placing the building in isolation and consequently it is highly visible against the flat parking lot. The presence of the original parking program forced us to design on a cramped piece of pavement at the entrance. These conditions prompted us to focus on the value of the project as a symbol as well as its morphological autonomy.

The objective is simple: control the entrance and exit, guide the vehicles, ensure a clear view of the entire parking lot, all while offering the public a welcoming and informational space. The architectural expression of the pavilion was found in the contradiction between controlling and welcoming the public, forming a duality between a plain building that groups the necessary mechanisms for control while realizing that which is necessary to create a welcoming public atmosphere.

To create a presence on the plot between a fence and the parking lot, we had to start by finding our place and a way to profit from the traces of the original building and its restrictions. In plan, the building respects the existing guides of the site by running parallel to the road and the fence. It begins to twist at grade to direct the reception area towards the pedestrian walkway. The goal was to reinforce the opening of the building towards the public through a simple and clear visual context. The twist heavily influenced the project by materializing the programmatic tension between controlling and welcoming the public, resulting in a hyperbolic paraboloid shape.

A single lowered corner allows the roofline over the entrance to project, creating a unique slope. The apparently simple geometric form hides the kinetic game at play, influencing the way in which one perceives the building and making it difficult to understand. The contortion attempts to go along with the flux in circulation that encircles it. It is in this simple distortion that a complex shape is generated, achieving the project’s objective: a discrete yet intriguing contemporary form found in the diversity of its perceptive approaches.

We chose an L shaped plan that optimizes the attendant’s view of the parking lot with openings on every facade. The layout creates a large area that is both open and protected from the elements. A canopy which is lit at night reinforces the presence of the structure and its program after dark. This space assembles and shelters the group of public services in such a way that all of the amenities such as the restroom and attendants office are easily accessible, while the exterior service fixtures (automated ticket machine, waste receptacle, newspaper dispenser, alarm, climate control and lighting) are integrated into the wall.

Constructed entirely in wood, the building presents its geometric form through the use of materials. The rough cladding sets up rows of identical lines of the same size that materializes the function of the building as an environmentally friendly service pavilion. They are successively contorted by a slight rotation that helps one perceive the movement of the building. The filtered envelope controls what one sees, allowing the attendant to see without being entirely seen. Although it is relatively simple, the cladding groups the dense variety of programs into a single exterior treatment, guaranteeing it’s symbol as a public building and addressing the wishes of the city. It is necessary to disguise the windows and ventilation, to design the blinds, lights, waste receptacle, displays and hardware in such a way that everything is integrated and protected.

The envelope system ensures the protection of the glazing in terms of thermal heat loss and security. It functions as a brise-soleil and helps with the ventilation, addressing the need for comfort during summer months. Inside, the cladding is composed of bakelised plywood. This material is used in the form of strips placed horizontally along the geometry defined by the structure. Backlit polycarbonate alveolar panels for the ceiling laminated flooring, and a natural resin complete the interior materials used to contrast with the rough exterior envelope.

Driven by the environmental context from which the project is derived as well as the surrounding landscape, we looked at the concept of a cabin. Natural and environmentally friendly materials from local industry that were acquired from nearby businesses and carried out by local labour with remarkable skill demonstrate a real approach to sustainable architecture, from concept to construction. It’s about giving meaning to architecture that is capable of expressing the environmental goals established by vehicle drop-off programs.

Client: Communauté du Pays d’Aix – Displacement Services
Project team: Jean-Luc Fugier lead architect, FeST Architecture associates
Location: Drop-off parking lot on Sisteron Road, Aix-en-Provence
Program:

• Parking attendant kiosk equipped with office for surveillance, restroom and kitchen
• Public reception area equipped with an accessible restroom, ticket machine, information and payment window

Type of mission: Complète limitée au bâtiment
Cost of the works: 62 500 Euros HT
Project area: 30 m²
Duration of Research: 9 months
Duration of Design: 3 months (including 3 weeks on the construction site)
Project year: December 2010

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Centre d’Examen du Permis by Samuel Delmas	GE WattStation by fuseproject	Café/day by Suppose Design Office

These photographs by Julien Lanoo show a French driving-test centre by Samuel Delmas Architectes, which is camouflaged to look like a fence.

Weathered rods of Corten steel surround the exterior of the Centre d’Examen du Permis, interrupted by black-framed box windows.

This screen provides solar shading for the glazed, prefabricated building while fences in the same material extend to either side.

Framed porches project from two sides of the centre to provide separate entrances for staff and the public.

The architects raised the building off the ground since the site in Gennevilliers, a suburb to the north-west of Paris, is prone to flooding.

More photography by Julien Lanoo on Dezeen »

The following text is provided by the architects:

Ioclimatic approach

To build in an easily flooded zone, a friendly and a warm edifice in an HEQ way of thinking while assuring the safety of the site and the longevity of the project.

Site, brief and project

The project takes place along the boulevard. It is used as an acces filter for the tracks thanks to its openwork envelope.

The fence on the boulevard uses the facade system and improves its presence on the way while developping a kinetic effect when you are driving all along the building.

The building skin is constituted of vertical elements, made of strips of timber or metalic slats, regularly spaced according to their function.

The envelope was made in order to solve all the constraints depending of the brief and of the site: solar protection, intimity, modularity of the building, prefabrication, anti-intervention, anti-vandal, environmental approach…

Building & sustainable development

Simple and rigorous volumes allow the optimisation of the way of building, the rationalization of the structure, of the envelope and of the networks.

Implementation of windbreak hedges composed of local species with persistent foliage. Preservation of the existing vegetation. Development of a biodiversity in relation with the site (humid environment).

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The drainage ditches allow to rid the water of pollution thanks to a system using plants.

Brief examination center for driving licence + projection room + documentation + cafeteria + exhibition room + offices + tracks and parking

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Site location Gennevilliers 92, France
Contracting authority Ministère de l’écologie, du développement durable, des transports et du logement – DDE 92
Av B. Frachon 92 000 Nanterre 01 56 38 29 80
Project manager a+ samueldelmas
Net floor area 580 m²+23 000 m² landscaping
Construction costs 2 250 000 euros excl tax
Calendar – delivered in April 2011
Prize-winner of the competition

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Outside spaces delivered in May 2009
Building delivered in April 2011

+ very high-performance Energy
+ puits canadien (earth cooling tubes)
+ solar filter

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Versailles Pavilion by Explorations Architecture	Kindergarten Kekec by Arhitektura Jure Kotnik	Extension to Residence Königswarte by Plasma Studio