This project’s aim was to renovate and expend an office building in the Hauts-de-Seine, just outside of Paris.
Our intervention took place on a six-story office building inserted into a dense urban fabric consisting of residential buildings. Set back from the street, it originally featured an architecturally rather poor facade. This facade was remodeled in 1996 to improve the building’s thermal and acoustic performance. However, its expression remained that of an office building, and the street setback could not be filled at the time. Both our client and the city officials expressed the wish to eliminate this urban void by extending the existing building towards the street.
Our project thus involved filling in this setback by constructing a horizontal extension along the entire height of the building. This intervention will completely conceal the gable wall of the neighboring building and densify the urban fabric by eliminating this neglected space. To create a coherent built frontage and ensure that the extension integrates harmoniously into the landscape of this residential street, we designed the new facade to evoke the appearance of a residential building, while also allowing for optimal use of the interior office spaces. This desire for integration also guided us toward the choice of St-Maximin limestone for this facade, a material greatly used in the construction of Paris and its surroundings.
The rear facade was also redesigned to allow for the integration of sunshades and a large staircase linking the garden at the back of the plot to the accessible, landscaped rooftop terrace.
Inside, all the upper floors were restructured as open-plan spaces allowing natural ventilation for the offices. On the ground floor and basement, reception and relaxation areas were created around a new patio dug in the garden to bring natural lights to all these shared spaces.
Category:Office BuildingsLocation:Hauts-de-Seine, FranceArchitect: Axel Cornu & Gabriel Verret, CoveArchitecture Office:Axel Cornu & Gabriel VerretAssociate Architects:Vincent Lavergne Architecture Urbanisme (VLAU)Design Team: Axel Cornu & Gabriel Verret, CovePhotographer: L'Autre Image Studio & VLAU (3D)
