6.20082^E

FILTERED REALITIES

Air of Paris
Project of installation of a Parisian office for Voies Naviguables de France (VNF) on a floating equipment.
Project management: Philippe Rahm architects (collaboration : Jérome Jacqmin, Andrej Bernik, Caroline Spielvogel, Cyril Assaad)
Client : VNF - Voies Naviguables de France
Place : Paris, 8th district 
Project: 2008

INTRODUCTION

The architecture is confronted today in a most evident way with the split or even a complete reversal of the traditional organization of its categories and its balances between inside and outside, artificial and natural, closed and opened because of pollution and of global warming. If the environment, outside architecture, is not natural anymore, we could then make the hypothesis of a "naturalization” of the inside spaces. Could architecture be re-configured by the stakes of sustainable development and its techniques not as the place of the artificial but as the place of nature? A second nature, geologic, chemical where nature would not be outside of the architecture but inside of it.

The reality of building related to the sustainable development and their precise management generates not only architectural form and his functional organization but also its spatial poetics. It establishes themes which potentials we amplify the until we invent new architectural typologies. It is thus the management of the air in the building that generates the shape and the spatial poetics of the building.

Our project recomposes soil in the inside for the necessity of the building’s techniques, with the management of air, the aeration with heat recovery, the management of water, the recovery of rain waters, the sanitary water heating by solar panels, and the purge. These will be natural intern soils characterized by the nature of the ground, the underground, the climate, the exposition, that will give its flavour and its taste to the air and to the water.

The limestone of various sorts, extracted from different sites, crossed by the Seine from its source until the sea, will give its taste to the air, whereas the glass, the polyethylene and the stainless steel, will remain chemically neutral in this architectural, olfactive and gustative composition.

AIR OF PARIS

PARISIAN ANTENNA OF INLAND WATERWAYS OF FRANCE

 

RENEWAL OFAIR 

Our project uses the principle of the air pulsed in the building, by transforming a technical problem of an internal canal routing air to the rooms in an architectonic and spatial principle. The size of the girdle of ventilation of the air pulsed is increased until it becomes a livable space which circulates, deforms, complies and unfolds, compresses and relaxs over the length of the building. 
Rather than being in galvanized steel, this canal is built in calcareous massive limestone , taking back on the length, from west to east, the geologic route of the Seine, from Le Havre to Paris, reproduced in miniature. 
Architectural quality we are proposing is that of an atmosphere, a smell, a flavour, an air of Paris , coming from the sea, from the West which will be changed, in the heart of the building, by the fine smell of limestone.
Some oaks are planted in this air course, adding by their presence a vegetal touch in the composition of this air perfume.

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