Transpac Office Building

Abstract

France has a long history of purpose designed cities and neighborhoods — the so-called Villes Nouvelles and “mini-Manhattans” like the Front de Seine and La Défense areas of Paris. Very often, these urban development zones, or entirely new constructions as in the case of the Villes Nouvelles, are carefully thought out, on paper. The reality is much less advantageous, as the PB12 and Beaugrenelle projects of Valode & Pistre have shown. They have successfully intervened to give a sense of true modernity to buildings that were originally heavy-handed and inefficient. Part of the difficulty in the French system may be the priority given to engineers, graduates of the famous Ponts et Chaussées school who have always been determined to show their prowess, often at the expense of architecture. Some of these lessons appear to have been learned with the newest development area in Paris, in the 13^th arrondissement, the Seine Rive Gauche district near Dominique Perrault’s National Library. Working on the basis of a master plan conceived by the Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc, a new boulevard, the Avenue de France, has been created on a concrete platform built over the railway tracks that lead to the Gare d’Austerlitz. It is at the edge of this platform that Valode & Pistre designed the future Transpac headquarters for the promoter Meunier.