Grenelle Tower by Atelier Zündel & Cristea
Atelier Zündel & Cristea architects presented their Grenelle Tower in Paris France, which has been commended by the Mipim AR FUTURE awards. At a time when Paris is reviewing its ambitions of ‘greatness’, the richness of the city’s diversity is transposed vertically into towers of shifting density.
Within a country where speed is not necessarily a condition of efficiency, and where “quality of life” is elevated to “the art of living”, a purely geographic and territorial expansion based upon the American model is unfeasible.
At the outset, we imagined the tower from an initial volume, which we considered a “spatial texture”, consisting of slabs stacked vertically to a height of 200 meters. Within this solid and uniform texture, we applied a dynamic formation process utilizing an empty tube of manifold geometry. In motion, this cavity becomes a generator of space, a dynamic, fluctuating, and evolving construct. Its topology will help us delineate such properties as proximity, contiguity, continuity.
More concretely, we are able to liken the tower to the diversity of the city: the uniform fabric of Parisian homes, the rapid transportation network, the squares, the parks, the avenues, the public meeting places of Parisians known and renowned.
Source: ArchDaily
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