PB12 Office Tower

Abstract

It seems that Valode & Pistre are often given the task of making old architecture modern. In the case of the PB 12 project, the original building, the 1970 Tour Crédit Lyonnais, located on the southern side of La Défense, has become all but invisible after their intervention. The owner of the building, the insurance company AXA, determined that demolition of the old structure would be prohibitively expensive, and after a competition in which Arquitectonica from Miami participated, Valode & Pistre suggested a radical reconstruction, adding approximately 200 m² per floor, they effectively did away with the original load-bearing façade. Increasing the average floor area from 800 m² to 1,000 m² and updating the technical facilities of the tower, the architects were able to offer spaces considered almost ideal in their configuration for potential occupants. With pillars every 1.4 meters, the Crédit Lyonnais tower had been practically opaque, rendering any real modernization extremely difficult. Essentially identical on each side, the old building was reworked in the direction of the Esplanade of La Défense by the architects, and in the process, the new façade was freed from the load-bearing. Since local building regulations required that the floor area of the building not be increased by the work, the architects sought to make use of the relatively large, but totally enclosed underground space of the first structure.