Opéra

[ 2020 ]

Project type Renovation of an office floor
Location Paris 2nd
Client Making Science
Area 211m2
Timeline December 2020
Photographer Christophe Caudroy

A floor of a Haussmannian building previously fitted out in the 1980s for office use.

A new company is moving in with the desire to completely redesign the space.

Each function has its own atmosphere. Everything connects subtly. Open spaces, a large meeting room, a kitchen with a big table, call boxes, and circulation areas with generous built-in benches.

The main corridor runs through all the spaces. Oblong in shape, it was designed like a running track, a playful nod to the company founders, who are passionate runners.

The architecture is frugal. The original 60x60 cm suspended ceiling grid has been retained to support a new, modular electrical system. Acoustic panels are placed in select areas. The walls are left raw, simply covered with a primer coat, without redoing the plasterwork. The carpet has been removed from the floor, now covered only with a fiber-reinforced screed. All new mechanical systems remain exposed. The call boxes are insulated using aluminum-faced wool panels salvaged during the demolition phase.

A know-how serving the greatest number

The architect founded Cent 15 Architecture in 2011 and immediately embarked on his first major project: the renovation of the Trianon theater in Paris (18th arrondissement). While the architect uses his fresh perspective as an asset to sharpen his skills, Cent 15 Architecture has spent the following decade patiently exploring all types of projects in Paris, the suburbs, and provinces, mastering the constraints inherent to each building and finding relevant solutions, regardless of the context of the structures to be built or their budgets.

While Cent 15 Architecture is skilled at managing large teams in all languages of Babel, it intentionally avoids taking on too many projects, as its architecture draws strength from its pursuit of perfection, its almost obsessive desire for the delivered building to be the image of the future project and the future itself.

Cent 15 Architecture is concerned with sustainability in architecture, using organic, natural, and bio-based materials. This is evident in the Tekès restaurant project, which incorporates a 10 cm thick earth slab for the restaurant floor, an earth plaster on all the walls and ceiling, rammed earth for the reception desk and the bases of the counters and benches.

The agency also focuses on implementing the most natural climate principles within the home. The 9th Avenue project, for example, involves the construction of a wooden-frame house with straw insulation, an interior earth plaster (partly sourced from the land itself), and heating generated by biomass (wood from trees felled on the property).

In rehabilitation projects, the goal is to retain as much of the existing structure as possible, reusing what is useful on-site and thus avoiding the implementation of excessive new elements. One of the agency's principles is the repurposing of certain materials (often inexpensive). The Opéra project, for example, utilizes aluminum film insulation for the façades of "call boxes," while the Papier Tigre project uses recycled corrugated fiberboard sheets as the formwork for the air conditioning motor. Each material has its own nobility, depending on how it is applied and presented.

The agency's approach is ultimately to bring architectural issues back to their core functions, with the perfectly mastered function creating the original aesthetics of a project that is always unique.