This theme explores the sustainability issues raised by the Anthropocene at the scale of buildings and urban environments, in all their material aspects, from design and construction to the uses to which they are put.
For Daniel Buren, architecture is an open-air studio. In an exclusive interview with architect Philippe Chiambaretta, he talks about his site-specific work, where art and architecture meet, just like the Nuages Colorés that cover the scales of the 175 Haussmann glass roof.
In the heart of Les Batignolles, PCA-STREAM is restructuring a former parking lot into a mixed-use complex of hotels, restaurants and offices. Based on the atypical and industrial dimension of the existing building, but also on the cultural and artisanal heritage of the neighborhood, the agency has chosen to infuse it with a spirit that emphasizes innovation and creativity. An emblematic central space physically and symbolically articulates the programs by offering cultural and event-based activities.
PCA-STREAM has won the competition for the extension of the Bobigny courthouse by designing a building with a balanced monumentality, reaffirming without excessive theatricality the sacredness of justice. The new courthouse will offer a functional and exemplary building, embodying the idea of a justice of care.
The renovation of this emblematic building in Nantes, the Tour Bretagne, is an opportunity to transform an obsolete symbol of the Trente Glorieuse era by adapting it to the contemporary challenges. PCA-STREAM and MAGNUM reinforce its elegance and slenderness by adding a mixed-use housing program, becoming the precursor of a new era for the city and metropolis.
At the initiative of the Comité Grande-Armée, PCA-STREAM delivers "Grande-Armée 2030", a strategic vision for reintegrating the Avenue de la Grande-Armée into the urban dynamic of Paris's historic thoroughfare and adapting it to the challenges of the 21st century city.
The restructuring of the 175 boulevard Haussmann is the opportunity to become part of a resilient and innovative city, capable of renewing itself. PCA-STREAM is bringing together two separate buildings to create a coherent office complex, focused on well-being and collaborative working. A contemporary and emblematic elevation, in glass scales, practically and symbolically links the buildings and eras. The complex has been chosen as the headquarters of the Lazard bank.
Covivio, Hines France, and PCA-STREAM have come together to create the Stream Building, a manifesto building located at the heart of the new Clichy-Batignolles district that integrates almost fifteen years of research by Stream Lab into innovations addressing the key challenges facing the cities of tomorrow. Circular by design, the Stream Building is a relational and productive hub that will energize this new urban center within the Greater Paris area by concentrating all the activities associated with a vibrant urban life.
Located near the Saint-Lazare train station, these new-generation offices in a former military barracks combine the best of two architectural heritages. They offer a comfortable and prestigious workplace, turned towards nature and the well-being of its users, French law firm Gide-Loyrette-Nouel. The building's heritage is magnified and remodeled, enhancing its attractiveness and competitiveness, while helping to write a new page in the history of Paris's ever-changing urban fabric.
PCA-STREAM’s restructuring of 52 Champs-Élysées, the former Virgin Megastore, contributes to renewing the image and attractiveness of the Champs-Élysées. The imposing Streamline Modern Art Deco building gains new coherence thanks to a magnification of its architectural style and a clarification of its program. It will host a Galeries Lafayette department store, high-end offices, and an exceptional garden restaurant overlooking Paris.
In the heart of the Golden Triangle district, at 32–34 Rue Marbeuf, PCA-STREAM is reinventing the iconic Citroën dealership from the 1930s for Gecina, restored to its former glory with rejuvenated original architecture, innovative workspaces, and a full-fledged hanging garden on terraces that open out onto Paris.
At the heart of the Silicon Sentier, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, PCA-STREAM is restructuring an imposing postal building from the 1950s following an ambitious approach both in terms of heritage and the environment. Adaptive reuse has enabled the building to now offer flexible, comfortable, and innovative spaces, complemented by high-end services, as well as exceptional outdoor spaces.
In the heart of the revitalized Porte Maillot district, PCA-STREAM revisits the Parisian modernist heritage and extends the city-nature dialogue. The agency’s intervention respects and enhances the architectural qualities of the original structure. On the north side, the façade grid is reinterpreted in a contemporary style inspired by its original rigorous layout. Designed as a balcony overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, it highlights the exceptional linear nature of the building with unobstructed views of the greater Parisian panorama.The new headquarters of Murex, the world leader in software for the financial markets, was designed above all to maximize interaction and collective intelligence, an essential function of a head office that has been reinforced by the health crisis. Spaces are streamlined and legible, and fluid circulation is ensured by a core of elevators and Chambord staircases on the first day. Employees meet and exchange ideas in a place conducive to informal dialogue.
With Ivry Confluences, located in a changing urban landscape featuring brownfield sites and eco-districts, PCA-STREAM is designing a symbol of the revitalization of the south end of Ivry-sur-Seine. In dialogue with the local industrial heritage, the studio reinterprets the morphology of railway halls to develop a new complex with exacting environmental standards. An exemplar of next-generation offices, Ivry Confluences takes an active part in adding to the vibrancy and diversity of the district thanks to its active base and an extensive garden that opens onto the city.
The Canopy project in Pré-Saint-Gervais is a rehabilitation of a brownfield site in the inner suburbs of Paris that offers next-generation work spaces. This project was first conceived by PCA-STREAM in 2005 but took more than ten years to come into being. The original proposal, which was to transform a former industrial hall in a open plan of atypical and innovative offices for creative businesses, has weathered the subprime mortgage crisis is finally materializing now that a new vision of the workspace has gained in acceptance.
The growth in energy consumption and the obsolescence of our infrastructures suggest that by 2030, we’ll have a stock of 60,000 tonnes of end-of-life wind turbines per year. To absorb this material on an industrial scale, we need to invent new ways of producing, consuming and building. With this in mind, the La Paletière project aims to reuse turbine blades – composite materials with multiple properties – by turning them into roofing elements.
The merger of the four central arrondissements of the French capital, the beating heart of Parisian culture, is embodied in the new administrative hub set up around Square du Temple, with the Paris Centre Town Hall and Police Precinct. PCA-STREAM is adapting, restoring, and revitalizing the Hôtel de la Garantie, a heritage complex from the 1920s, in order to accommodate almost 600 police officers under new, enhanced working conditions.
“ Unfortunately, the ambiance is seen as a corrective factor to be dealt with. ”
“ Unfortunately, the ambiance is seen as a corrective factor to be dealt with. ”
The challenges of air in architecture encompass a wide range of considerations that can affect the shape of a building, its degree of openness, the proportion of voids and solids, or the implementation of specific technical solutions. To reconcile seemingly contradictory requirements, such as the tension between energy efficiency and natural ventilation, architects and engineers are redoubling their inventiveness. Air, due to its invisibility, invites us to create an atmosphere and to consider buildings in terms of breathability.
The former headquarters of the Telegraph, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, offered an exceptional building whose image had been gradually degraded by its successive occupants. PCA-STREAM revamped the site and reinvigorated this heritage property through the installation of new workspaces. An in situ artistic creation also reactivates its intimate links with the history of French telecommunications.
“ Restoring a building does not mean maintaining, repairing or remaking it, it means restoring it to a complete state that may never have existed at any given time, according to Viollet-Le-Duc. ”
“ Restoring a building does not mean maintaining, repairing or remaking it, it means restoring it to a complete state that may never have existed at any given time, according to Viollet-Le-Duc. ”
Viollet-le-Duc is famous for restoring the spire of Notre-Dame, which had been knocked down in 1792. In the course of this construction project, he reinvented the statues of the portals and the Kings’ Gallery, which had been decimated during the Revolution, because, in his words: “Restoring an edifice does not mean maintaining, repairing or remaking it, it means re-establishing it in a complete state that may never have existed at a given moment.” Bérénice Gaussuin, PhD in architecture, whose book Viollet-le-Duc : La forge d’une théorie de la restauration par la pratique (Viollet-le-Duc: Forging a theory of restoration through practice) has just been published (CNRS Éditions), takes a look at the approach of this extraordinary restorer.
360 is part of the dynamic revitalization of the Plateau district and the future prospect of a pacification of the ring road. The project rehabilitates three office buildings from the 1980s that no longer meet current needs and expectations. Its remarkable location and accessibility, at the head of the ring road, at the border of Vanves and Paris, invited an ambitious rehabilitation to develop comfortable, efficient and innovative spaces, while adapting the building to contemporary environmental issues.
PCA-STREAM lends new impetus to a banking complex from the late nineteenth century, remarkable by its heritage value but closed on itself and poorly adapted to today’s modern requirements. Through a subdued intervention following a circular approach, the studio has augmented the building with new outdoor spaces, as well as programs and services that are largely porous to the vibrant city life within the district.
Mathieu Arnoux, Professor at the University of Paris and Director of Studies at the EHESS, Isabelle Bensidoun, economist at the CEPII, Vincent Charlet, economist and founder of the Fabrique de l’Industrie and Liliana Doganova, sociologist and researcher at the CSI des Mines de Paris. This concluding conference looks at the social and economic dynamics associated with the exploitation of materials on a national and global scale. The war in Ukraine has revealed our dependence on our neighbours and reopened questions of sovereignty and self-sufficiency. France has been less affected by the Russian gas embargo than Germany, but the transition to renewable energies will not happen without the rare earths that we import mainly from China. The limits of globalisation seem to have been reached. What does this mean for our industry, our sectors and our economic policy? What role will the markets play, particularly the carbon market, in encouraging national and European materials?
With Marie Sarah Adenis, artist, Aurélie Mossé, research professor at ENSAD, and Simon Trancart, Head of Adaptative Laboratory Evolution at Ginkgo BioWorks. Wood is often referred to as a living material because it reacts to ambient humidity and develops a patina. However, when a tree is cut down to exploit its wood, it dies and ceases to photosynthesise. What other forms of living matter can we cultivate and grow to build and create, and what ethics should we apply? What does the future hold for organic materials that can regenerate rapidly or perhaps never die and continue to evolve as living matter? From the colourimetric properties of microbes to the use of algae to develop alternative chemical reactions to form cements and ceramics that emit less carbon, what possibilities does living matter offer us for rethinking creation?
With Mathieu Merlet Briand, artist, Benoit Roman, research director at the CNRS, Xavier Baris from Kairos and Michael Gaultois, Chief Scientific Officer of Fairmat. With the growing disenchantment of the public and designers alike with plastic, perceived as the offspring of the oil years and the symbol of a disposable world, the development of new materials that respond to contemporary challenges by proposing circular production schemes is long overdue. The Deeptech ecosystem is struggling to get off the ground in France, given the investment required. The government and the regions are encouraging research and entrepreneurial initiatives such as the FLOWER project to develop composites made from flax fibre, a plant widely grown in France. What are the neo-composites of tomorrow? What new mythologies do they invoke?
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!