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The Parc d’Affaires east of the Paris metropolitan municipality of Asnières-sur-Seine is part of a Coordinated Development Zone (in French Zone d’Améngagement Concerté) to create a mixed-use community in a former industrial area. Achieving such far-reaching change requires far-reaching regeneration of the urban fabric, with the introduction of a range of buildings of different typologies and functions.
Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia have contributed to the on-going transformation with two buildings whose similar geometric features and height dialogue with each other. Both rise nine stories above their base. The first is a 62-apartment housing block; the second a 273-room student residence. Both form a piece of the distinctive yet coordinated urban fabric under construction where architecture contributes expressive continuity but also diversity, distinctive materiality and color schemes.
Buildings that go beyond the merely functional to give a sense of a complex yet coordinated whole are the hallmark of this new neighborhood, an extensive articulated project conceived as developing from an initial architectural “cell”. Within this framework, however, the two buildings, despite their affinity of materials, color scheme, and certain design features, have their own individuality: of function – one, a housing block with apartments of varying size, the other, a student residence based on the egalitarian principle of identical living units; and of façade configuration. The compact massing of the student accommodation derives from a rigorous grid-like pattern of horizontal slabs and protruding vertical partitions in exposed concrete that clearly indicates the interior layout of sequential identical rooms. This regularity is mitigated by the elevation’s dynamic luminosity conferred by perforated metal panels fitted at a splayed angle into the deep recess of the orthogonal grid on just one...
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