Office building in Paris

Building use

Office building

Country/Region

France

Overview

The building serves as the new office building for about 100 staff of the administrative staff of the Parc de la Villette, an important green area in the city of Paris. The building occupies only a part of the area of the pre-existing buildings, and the demolition of the asbestos-polluted structures allowed to release a significant area for the park and nature. The demolition phase allowed the re-use and recycling of 81% of the materials coming from the pre-existing buildings. The new structure is conceived as a two-level building, with a bottom portion in pre-fabricate concrete and composite elements and the floor above in timber.

Basic information (construction date, number of stories, gross floor area, adopted design code, engineer(s), Contractor(s), etc.)

Construction date: 2021-2023
Number of stories: 2
Gross floor area: 3,000m2
Adopted design code: –
Engineer(s): EVP Ingenierie
Contractor(s): Operateur du Patrimoine et des projects immobiliers de la culture (OPPIC)

Issue and/or innovation

The goal of the project was to minimize as much as possible, the environmental impact of the new building, releasing as much space as possible to the park and using dry and reversible construction systems, minimizing the impact on the park during the construction period.
Also, the design of the building required the materials (concrete and timber to be exposed) so the construction solution had to provide the required fire resistance without the adoption of fireproofing layers.

Reason for composite solution

The composite solution was chosen to increase the construction speed of the building as well as to offer a load bearing capacity of 500kg/m2 while keeping relatively long spans of 12 meters width. At the same time, the total building height was limited to 8 meters, so the concrete slab had to be kept at a minimum thickness (maximum height allowed by the “plans des folies” elaborated for the park in the 1980’s by the architect Tchumi). The pre-fabricated composite columns and the pre-fabricated composite beams (both supplied by the company Tecnostrutture) were completed with pre-fabricated concrete hollow-core slabs. This allowed an extremely simple, quick and little impacting activity on site with a relatively small amount of concrete to be poured during the construction phase.

Specific solution/technical details

The building features a very simple grid with spans of the concrete level doubling this grid up to 12 meters of free span. Pre-fabricated composite columns were used for the structure, connected to pre-fabricated composite beams that were able to carry the load of the hollow-core slabs even before the final layer of concrete was poured.

Impact or effectiveness

The building height respects the limit of 8 meters imposed by the parc rules in the area, still allowing the required load bearing capacity of 500kg/m2 on spans up to 12 meters. The quality of the finished concrete is superb as it can be seen in the images available on the website of the architect.