The city renews itself and the industrial hotel of the Austerlitz development zone discovers a new future housing a centre of biotechnology, adapting a building of the 1980s to contemporary criteria.
The structure of this imposing building, witness of its time, remains unchanged. The intervention reframes, restructures and redefines the form to integrate it better into the city and connect it with the new university district built on the banks of the Seine.
The built volumes are split to make way for a new road system irrigating the heart of the urban block freed of its former slab and transformed into square place.
The cut gable ends are dressed in a metal trellis, forming a support for vegetation which gives its colour to the change of usage.
Formerly austere, the heart of block becomes a green environment in facades stepped into terraces, doubled by a generous wave-like pergola over which grows roses, bellflowers, acanthuses and clematises.
The courses are carried out behind this vegetable cascade which protects the offices from the sunning and floods the place.
External blinds, slipping by stringcourses and industrial boardings supplement the requalifiquation of the frontages, gratifies of a new dynamism. In a limited budget, the operation fits explicitly in what exists and brings a welcome breathing to this small island in second rank on the Seine.