ÎLE SEGUIN

Our agency wished to carry out a global approach in all its dimensions to conceive a project in the respect of the structuring principles of the DBS project as a whole favoring a harmonious integration in the environment. It is a question of fitting into the existing, to consider the ecosystems in place and to establish plant continuities while guaranteeing public access and the use of soft mobility. The volumes of the building form a continuous façade with transparency on the public garden side towards the Seine and a real urban character on the central alley side.

The agency's work focused on topographical research and the treatment of the existing base of the island, the deliberate inclusion of the building in the environment of the Seine landscape, the opening up of the facades in relation to exposure to the sun and the circulation of users, the vegetation in various forms, the creation of a ground floor crossing and multi-use for the public as well as the mutability of offices into housing. The agency's modus operandi translates into a specific approach favoring visual porosity and generous volumetry in order to encourage modular uses.

Multi-use program: The program is composed of offices and shops and is designed on a human scale to allow the deployment of diverse and modular uses. The public spaces on the ground floor cover a total area of 2,500m2, including shops, restaurants and cafés, a business center and an open space reserved for sports. Thanks to a generous volumetry, the ground floor, dug into the existing base, has been specifically designed to allow public access to several services and to create a visual porosity from the central street to the public garden. Generosity was also applied to the treatment of the office spaces, allowing for flexibility of occupation and circulation for users. A cantilever on the roof of the building, offering a terrace, provides a view of the island as well as the skyline of Paris and points from the central esplanade as a signal towards the Emerige Foundation.

Mutability in housing: The organization of the served and served spaces allows the mutability of the project. The reversibility leads to reconsider the geometry of the work and its thickness, but also its structural framework linked to the constructive system and the positioning of the openings as well as the interior partitions. The potential to transform the current office use into housing is an integral part of the project from the design phase and is reflected in particular by the modular treatment of the glass, the generous grid of the facades (3 meters wide), the flexible exterior spaces (offering a gain in surface area in terms of housing mutability) as well as a generous volumetry in terms of heights and surfaces.

It is a question of being able to respond to this challenge of innovation in a fast-paced society with extremely diverse expectations in terms of uses and to the immediate needs of people in a metropolis characterized by strong tensions in the housing market. Reversible thinking means fighting against programmed obsolescence and anticipating the evolution of a building before it is even built, in order to reduce the need for adaptations and their costs when it is transformed in the future.

For Hines and Icade

Urban planning: Christian de Portzamparc

Landscaper: Michel Desvigne

Among Richard Rogers, ChartierDalix Architectes, Sou Fujimoto et XTU Architects