French practice AWP has remodelled a water-treatment plant outside Paris to reveal its industrial processes to the public.
Located beside the Seine to the south of the city, the Évry Water-Treatment Plant was first established in the 1970s. Following a design competition in 2003, AWP developed a new masterplan for the site, adding four new buildings and a surrounding landscape of trees and gardens that will all be accesible to visitors.
Each of the buildings has a prefabricated concrete structure, with timber screens wrapping the upper sections to soften the industrial appearance of the facades. These screens surround large external ducts, as well as a number of balcony corridors.
The smallest of the four buildings functions as an entrance and exhibition centre for tourists, who will be able to tour the plant when it opens to the public later this year.
Construction and renovation of four industrial buildings and a water park
Located on the Seine river front, close to a key metropolitan route (the Francilienne), Évry water depuration plant is a major infrastructural element that is at once symbolic and highly functional, reflecting environmental, technical and urban considerations.
The first plant was built in the 70s and the aim of this renovation is to increase and optimise its capacity. The urban dimension of the equipment has guided us towards a strategy of opening-up and hospitality. Previously rejected and hidden, this infrastructure is now relocated on the urban scene, so as to have a public role and to become symbolic. Regularly open to visitors, this equipment will become both a landmark and an experiential water filtering park.
The formal strategy consists of a main axis along the river where gardens, new buildings and tanks are located. Buildings will be renovated and their façades completely redesigned as urban scale filters.
This two-storey extension by French architect Loïc Picquet converts an old farm building into a rural guesthouse in the Alsace region of France (+ slideshow).
Loïc Picquet renovated the interior of the single-storey farmhouse to accommodate a communal living and dining room, then added the timber-clad extension to create four guest rooms, each with a double bed and en suite bathroom.
The timber frame of the existing structure is exposed inside the building, so the architect followed suit by leaving wooden ceiling beams uncovered in each of the new bedrooms.
Floors are also wooden, while stable doors separate bedrooms from bathrooms and timber-framed cubbyholes contain extra beds and storage areas.
“A new wood construction was added as a natural and fluid extension of the old farm, not only renovating it but mostly honoring it by the use of its history and details,” said the architect. “Niches were built in the walls and double doors were chosen over the regular ones, so that a special interaction between the bathroom and the room could be created.”
A chunky wooden staircase with staggered treads leads to the new upper floor and marks the divide between the new and old structures.
New timber-framed panel windows were added to the old building, while square Velux windows were installed for each of the bedrooms in the extension.
News: Saint Laurent has opened the doors to its new flagship store in Paris, the first to be designed by Hedi Slimane since he became creative director of the fashion house last year.
Located on Avenue Montaigne near the Champs-Élysées, the art deco-inspired Saint Laurent store features a marble staircase encased by rods of nickel-plated brass.
Black and white marble has been used for the walls, floors and a row of shelves, above which hang nickel-plated bars for displaying clothes.
The monochrome interior is reflected in the black and white photographs accompanying the opening of the store.
Formerly known as Yves Saint Laurent, after its founder, the fashion house’s name was changed soon after Slimane took over as creative director last spring.
Saint Laurent’s Sloane Street concept store in London is set to open in the autumn.
The latest tool to get the royal Best Made Co. treatment, the Laguiole 127, is a better functioning and more aesthetically pleasing version of your traditional toothpick pocket knife. As we’ve seen before, Best Made really…
Doors, windows and recesses are picked out in yellow ochre on the timber facade of this retirement home near Paris by French studio Vous Êtes Ici Architectes (+ slideshow).
The four-storey Morangis Retirement Home was designed by Vous Êtes Ici Architectes with a Y-shaped plan that divides the interiors into three wings.
Siberian larch is arranged in vertical strips over the exterior of the building and also forms canopies across the various entrances.
The primary entrance is located at the junction of two wings and leads into the centre of the building. Additional entry points are positioned along the northern facade for service access.
The ground floor of the building is taken up by communal rooms, health facilities and staff areas. Shared dining rooms, living rooms and other social areas are grouped together around the south-east elevation and open to a private residents’ garden.
Bedrooms occupy the three upper floors of the building. The first and second floors accommodate typical residents and are divided into clusters of 13 bedrooms, each with their own dining and activity room. Meanwhile, the third floor is dedicated to patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.
Central corridors provide clear routes between the different sections of each floor. Rather than relying on artificial lighting, they each feature windows to bring in as much daylight as possible.
The third floor also features two roof terraces with direct access to ground level via a pair of outdoor staircases.
Read on for more details from Vous Êtes Ici Architectes:
Ehpad de Morangis – Vous Êtes Ici Architectes
How could we build a socially orientated retirement home and never neglect comfort and sensorial fulfillment?
A retirement home for all
Based on an off-plan concept led by AXENTIA as a social contractor and IMMODIEZE as a private developer, the Morangis Retirement Home was constructed with financial support from the Conseil Général de l’Essone, Regional support as well as the Regional Health Agency and the town of Morangis.
The operator and tenant of the new building is an Autonomous Public Establishment that offers stays as low as €60 per day. This low and democratic offer was attained without sacrificing the quality of service or the finish of the construction.
An orientated building
The building is constructed on 4 levels and is based on a Y-shaped plan. The building occupies the site as follows: 1) The main public entrance is located where the “Y’ strands connect 2) The north façade is dedicated to service, deliveries and employee’s entrance 3) The south façade is generously opened towards the residents private park
The plan is organized according to a few constraints: compact, rational and open towards the outside.
The living areas as well as the main activities areas (restaurant, salon) are developed around the private gardens. These areas benefit from the view and easy dedicated access to the gardens. The gardens include therapeutically themed spaces as well as more traditional paths around flower beds and a rose garden.
The rooms on floor one and two are dedicated to classical geriatric residents, the rooms are disposed into 6 units of 13 rooms each.
The third floor is dedicated to patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or other similar neurological disorders. The floor includes vast dedicated spaces for specialized activities, rest and well-being.
All the floors are accessible from the central node intersecting all of the buildings functions and patient units.
Views and light for all
One of the base lines of this project is to offer, all through the construction and all its sleeping units, framed views. Each unit has a main gathering area for activities or meals as well as a smaller area placed in front of loggia or suspended gardens. All these small areas include large windows and quality framed views.
The corridors, usually blind and suffocating spaces, always include wider spaces with outside views, this allows our elders to move around at their pace towards lights and rest areas in the buildings circulations, they may easily meet and chat with fellow residents without having a difficult and stressing path to do so.
The third floor has two large terraces easily accessible to the residents. These terraces, widely orientated towards the park, are treated as a prolongation of the inner spaces.
On an individual’s point of view, the building rooms were designed differently with windows offering distant views of the countryside and treated as hotel rooms more than hospital rooms. The windows all designed with a glass panel to the floor allowing bedded residents to have a view.
Materials and Volumes
A unique volume with different spaces: unity is not uniformity.
On the outer skin wrapping the building, openings are pierced following no specific symmetry; the sculpted facades offer various views and volumes behind the outer skin.
This envelope covering the building is made out of Siberian larch wood; these wooden boards are warm and comforting. The outer skin vibrates according to the sun and time of the day. The larch boards are top quality solid wood, they are butted together to prevent deformation and to remove defaults.
Wooden awnings extend the facades skin away from the building creating shelter from the sun and rain and protecting the ground floor’s salons and restaurants.
Every time the outer skin is punched in to form a dent in the global volume this corresponds to a specific socializing space: inner rest areas widely opened towards the park or the third floors terraces. The “dents” allow the sun and the light to reach in deeply into the building for those whom have difficulties moving about. As soon as the outer skin is breached to create a volume a different material and color is used to outline these inner volumes. A warm orange to yellow coating has been applied on the outer walls exaggerating the warmth of the light. The ambiance is friendly and warm and the yellow resonates nicely with the natural warmth of wood. As a result the dynamic spaces we offer are worth the effort needed to reach by elderly people.
This bright and lively color, stimulating without being aggressive, is also the one used for the window and door frames of the facades found under the awnings and in the bedrooms. As one approaches the building and passes below the awnings towards the yellow coating, as he is welcomed, will feel and understand the building’s harmony. One will easily understand how the building works and how it is connected to its natural and urban surroundings.
Developer: Immodieze and AXENTIA for the Conseil General du 91 Architects: Vous Êtes Ici Architectes Location: Morangis southern Parisian suburb Program: Retirement home with 91 rooms Cost: 9.4 million euros Calendar: First building permit 2010, final delivery 2013 Area: 5315 sqm, 46 parking spaces, total plot area 9950 sqm Partners and collaborators: Dumez IDF (general contractor), FACEA (fluids engineering) LECARPENTIER (exteriors and landscaping) SPOOMS (kitchen engineering) CAP HORN (Acoustics engineering) LAPOINTE (roads and water engineering)
Haute couture garments by Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen will be displayed at an exhibition of her work in Calais, France, from June.
Considered a pioneer of 3D printing in the fashion industry, Van Herpen utilises both new technologies and hand crafting techniques to create intricate sculptural designs.
The International Centre for Lace and Fashion of Calais consecrates a new exhibition to Iris van Herpen. At 29, this young Dutch fashion designer has largely impressed the fashion world with her futuristic sculptural costumes. Through the presentation of thirty pieces created between 2008 and 2012, the International Centre for Lace and Fashion invites the spectator to plunge into the avant-garde universe of this prodigious creator!
Iris van Herpen
Iris van Herpen is a young Dutch designer (born Wamel, 1984) who has made a considerable impact in the world of Haute-Couture in recent years. Following in the footsteps of Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan and Rei Kawakubo, her innovative, sculptural dresses represent a major contribution to the conceptual end of high fashion, deconstructing and examining the creative process and the relationship between clothes and the human form.
After training at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Netherlands) and a passage with Alexander McQueen, Iris van Herpen set out to develop and explore her unique combination of traditional craftsmanship and technological innovation. Invited by the prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Haute-Couture to show her first Parisian collection in July 2011, Iris van Herpen creates clothes of subtle, poetic, unsettling beauty. Their sculptural forms, enriched by the play of light, place them somewhere between Haute-Couture and contemporary art. And yet the designer does seem intent on creating designs which can be worn by everyone, capturing and reflecting the wearer’s personality and aspirations: she launched her first ready-to-wear line in March 2013.
Exhibition Layout
The International Centre for Lace and Fashion of Calais highlights the recent collections of Iris van Herpen through the presentation of thirty dresses and numerous photographs. The exhibition gallery is a large, minimalist plateau some seven metres tall and sixty metres in length, a majestic backdrop against which to appreciate the creations of this celebrated Dutch fashion designer, unique pieces which blur the boundaries between art, design and fashion. The gallery’s light walls and polished concrete floor will be plunged into twilight, with lights carefully placed to ensure that all eyes are drawn to the dresses on display.
These creations are arranged by date and by collection, displayed on stands so that they can be seen from all angles. These original Iris van Herpen dresses are placed in confrontation and conversation with the photographs displayed immediately opposite them. Visitors can also see the dresses in motion, with footage of van Herpen’s catwalk shows projected on the big screen in the auditorium.
The radically original forms and materials used in Iris van Herpen’s works qualify them as “wearable sculptures”. The pieces displayed here demonstrate her ability to craft complex designs which draw on a wide variety of techniques, with interweaving elements, intricate lacing and fluting. Certain parts of the body, notably the shoulders and hips, are accentuated with voluminous extensions. Some materials make recurring appearances: leather in various forms and styles, acrylics subjected to various manipulations, metal chains and plastic straps. The colour palette is deliberately muted, offset with occasional metallic effects and flashes of iridescence.
News: Danish firm BIG has been selected to design an 80-hectare shopping and leisure complex with a park on its roof to serve a business district between two Paris airports.
EuropaCity will be located in the Triangle de Gonesse – an area southwest of Charles de Gaulle International Airport and north of the smaller Le Bourget Airport – and themed around the diverse cultures of the European continent.
“We propose to integrate the new facility in the surrounding business district as an urban form that combines dense city with open landscape,” said BIG, referring to the grassy parkland that will cover the structure.
A mix of retail and entertainment offerings will be arranged along a circular avenue, which forms a loop through five themed areas: Avenue de France, Rambla de Mediterranea, British Square, Norden Platz and East Boulevard.
Bicycle lanes and electric public transport – seen in the image above as small white pods – will enable visitors to get around the hub.
BIG also proposes to make EuropaCity a showcase for sustainable technology by using waste heat from cooling plants to heat swimming pools, recycling waste water to irrigate the parks and installing solar, wind and geothermal energy.
EuropaCity will offer on an unprecedented scale a mix of retail, culture and leisure around a defining theme: Europe, its diversity, its urban experiences and its cultures. The site is exceptionally well connected: Locally as a main node on the Grand Paris Express Metro, regionally as entrance gate to the metropolitan area of Ile de France and internationally with its direct connection to the second largest airport in Europe. We propose to integrate the new facility in the surrounding business district as an urban form that combines dense city with open landscape, exploring the urban and green potentials of the site at once.
The programmes of EuropaCity are organised along an internal circular avenue with a mix of retail, entertainment and cultural programmes on both sides. The avenue forms a loop travelling through five different areas themed as the various regions of Europe, becoming the Rambla, the Regent Street and the Champs Elysees of EuropaCity. Along the avenue bicycles and electric public transport bring visitors around and a line of trees transform gradually from Birches in the North, Pines in the east, palm trees in the south and Platans in the west. The circular avenue creates a variety of spatial experiences and a clear overview – it allows you to get lost, and still find your way.
We propose to arrange the programmes according to energy and resource use, in order to maximise utilisation of waste products within a closed urban ecosystem. Waste heat is channelled from cooling plants into recreation facilities as swimming pools and spas. Waste water is re-used as irrigation for the parks, and urban scale recycling facilities minimise overall waste production. The five regions of Europe have a different ways of harvesting renewable energy, from solar power to wind and geothermal energy. EuropaCity becomes a laboratory for sustainable technologies, and a showcase for viable green tech implementations that does not only save energy, but also improves the quality of the urban environment.
Partner in charge: Bjarke Ingels, Andreas Klok Pedersen Project leader: Joao Albuquerque, Gabrielle Nadeau Team: Maren Allen, David Tao, Salvador Palanca, Marcos Bano, Lucian Racovitan, Ryohei Koike, Camille Crépin, Elisa Wienecke, Léna Rigal, Paolo Venturella, Tiina Liis Juuti, Jeff Mikolajewski.
Name: EuropaCity Type: Invited Competition Size: 80 Hectare Client: Groupe Auchan Collaborators: Tess, TransSolar, Base, Transitec, Michel Forgue
London firm Farshid Moussavi Architecture has won a competition to design an apartment block in Montpellier with designs for a tower made from a stack of rippling floor plates.
The Jardins de la Lironde tower will comprise eleven irregularly shaped levels, arranged in a seemingly random order to create balconies on different sides of the building.
A total of 36 apartments will be contained within the upper storeys of the building, while a restaurant will occupy the ground floor.
Lot 2, Jardins de la Lironde, is the first of 12 new buildings planned for the Port Marianne district. The brief for every structure is to create a “modern folly” that references the eighteenth-century chateaux built by wealthy merchants around Montpellier.
Farshid Moussavi Architecture will continue to work on the next stages of the project and construction is set to begin in 2014.
News: Dutch firm OMA is to masterplan a new urban development south of Bordeaux based around the extension of the local tram system.
OMA’s design will regenerate the neighbourhoods of Bègles and Villenave d’Orno as the new line introduces a connection to Bordeaux’s central station.
“We took the tramway extension as an opportunity to rebuild this part of the city,” said OMA associate and project leader Clement Blanchet, who has proposed moving the line back from the main thoroughfare.
“By shifting the tramline from its previously planned location, we create potential for new types of housing and commercial development,” he said.
The firm will work on the public space alongside the line over the next five years in collaboration with landscape architect Coloco.
OMA has also been working on a masterplan for 50,000 new housing units in Bordeaux, while other projects by the firm currently underway in France include the École Centrale school of engineering in Saclay, near Paris – see all architecture by OMA.
This renovation of a crumbling 1960s tower block in Paris nicknamed “Alcatraz” topped the architecture category of this year’s Designs of the Year Awards and is in the running for the top prize to be announced tonight (+ slideshow).
The 16-storey Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, originally designed by French architect Raymond Lopez, contains 96 apartments in the northern outskirts of the city, but after 60 years of ageing and neglect the building needed a significant overhaul to bring the accommodation up to modern standards.
French architect Frédéric Druot teamed up with Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal of Lacaton & Vassal on the competition-winning redesign. Their renovation included extending the floorplates outwards to increase the size of rooms plus create new conservatories and balconies.
A facade of corrugated aluminium clads the new exterior of the tower, interspersed with large windows and glazed balconies. Floor-to-ceiling glass separates the apartments from the new terraces to let more natural light into each residence.
Architect Amanda Levete, on the Designs of the Year judging panel, described the project as “a clever and elegant solution” that is “far from the usual cosmetic approach that fools no-one”. She added: “Completed at half the cost of demolition and new build, this is an exemplary lesson in harnessing clever thinking and ingenuity to transform neglected parts of our cities.”
Here are a few words from the architects and some project details in French:
The Bois-le-Prêtre Tower Metamorphosis
Conversion of 100 social dwellings, operation in occupied site and high environmental quality, 5 Bld du Bois le Prêtre, Paris 17ème
The project of metamorphosis of the “Bois Le Prêtre” Tower consists of a radical transformation of the conditions of comfort and habitability of the 100 residences of the occupied building. The tower built in 1962 by the architect Raymond Lopez, develops on 50m height, 16 levels serving each one 4 or 8 residences.
By addition of heated extensions, winter-gardens and balconies, the overall surface of origin of 8900m2 is carried to 12460m2. This new organisation of surfaces and the precise technical improvements make it possible to adapt the rental offer while meeting by the creation of new typologies the needs for the families, to return lime pit foot the access to all the residences, to reduce passively, the consumption of energies of more than 50%, mainly by the addition of the winter-gardens.
Maître d’ouvrage: PARIS HABITAT Architecte mandataire: Frédéric Druot Architecture Architectes associés: Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal
Coût des travaux: 11,2 euros HT Livraison (en cours): Octobre 2011 Missions: Mission de base + Diagnostic + Concertation Spécificités: Travaux en site occupé Certification CERQAL HQE
Above: Tour Bois-le-Prêtre before the renovation
Above: typical floor plan – click for larger image
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